Continental Philosophy Review 34: 287320, 2001. 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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Return to Hegel
J.M. FRITZMAN
Department of Philosophy, Lewis and Clark College, Portland, OR 97219-7899, USA E-mail: Fritzman@lclark.edu

Abstract. This article argues that Hegel read Lacan. Put less paradoxically, it claims that situating Hegel within a Lacanian paradigm results in an understanding of the future as still open and of history as not ended. Absolute knowing, on this model, is the recognition of the way in which history has developed, not a claim that it can advance no further. The article aims to persuade those who might otherwise dismiss Hegel for example, persons au courant with poststructuralism that he still can make a decisive contribution to current debates.

It seems to us that the history of philosophy should play a role roughly analogous to that of collage in painting. The history of philosophy is the reproduction of philosophy itself. In the history of philosophy, a commentary should act as a veritable double and bear the maximal modification appropriate to a double. (One imagines a philosophically bearded Hegel, a philosophically clean-shaven Marx, in the same way as a moustached Mona Lisa.) It should be possible to recount a real book of past philosophy as if it were an imaginary and feigned book. Borges, we know, excelled in recounting imaginary books. But he goes further when he considers a real book, such as Don Quixote, as though it were an imaginary book, itself reproduced by an imaginary author, Pierre Menard, who in turn he considers to be real. In this case, the most exact, the most strict repetition has as its correlate the maximum of difference (The text of Cervantes and of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer. . . .). Commentaries in the history of philosophy should represent a kind of slow motion, a congelation or immobilisation of the text: not only of the text to which they relate, but also of the text in which they are inserted so much so that they have a double existence and a corresponding ideal: the pure repetition of the former text and the present text in one another.1 Hegel in context?2 The slightest alteration in the relation between man and the signifier, in this case in the procedures of exegesis, changes the whole course of history by modifying the moorings which anchor his being.3 In Hegels Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, Pippin argues that the Kantian paradigm is the proper context in which to situate Hegel.

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Hegels speculative philosophy should be read as completing Kant. Pippin writes that references to Kants critical idealism are indispensable for a proper understanding of Hegels position and that Hegels position extends and deepens Kantian antiempiricist, antinatural, antirationalist strategies.4 In short, Pippin believes that Hegel read Kant. Situating Hegel in a Kantian context allows Pippin to perceive that all of Hegels favorite metaphors, neologisms, and important summary claims stress again and again that the Absolute is a process, movement, activity, and so forth, and it is thus appropriate that his account of Absolute Knowledge involves a self-consciousness about such a process rather than its final completion and so termination (HI, p. 247). Pippin also sees that Hegels Science of Logic does not conclude by proposing a new logic; the reflective logic of concept, judgment, and syllogism is all weve got. It proposes only a comprehension of the limitations of such a logic for a full self-understanding. In turn, this would mean that a truly determinate reflection is not a resolution of the opposition between positing and external reflection, but a continuation of such a constantly unstable reflective enterprise in a suitable self-conscious (and so, in a speculative sense, satisfied) way (HI, p. 257). Placing Hegel in a Kantian context involves, of course, a repudiation of traditional, theological, and metaphysical interpretations of Hegel. Such a reading of Hegel means that absolute knowing cannot represent an identification of subject and object, mind and world, knower and known, in-itself and for-itself. Instead, as Hegel writes, absolute knowing is a process: The identity of the Idea with itself is one with the process; the thought which liberates actuality from the show of purposeless mutability and transfigures it into the Idea must not represent this truth of actuality as a dead repose, as a mere picture, lifeless, without impulse or movement, as a genius or number, or an abstract thought; by virtue of the freedom which the Concept attains in the Idea, the Idea possesses within itself also the most stubborn opposition; its repose consists in the security and certainty with which it eternally creates and eternally overcomes that opposition, in it meeting with itself.5 Hegels absolute is the self-conscious recognition of this process and that the fissure separating the in-itself and the for-itself is ineliminatable. Pippin recognizes: Hegels own account of the telos or end point of such a process does not conclude with any substantive theory of the basic principles of all account giving. In the third book of the Logic, his interest is much more focused on the process by which any such principle is established and he everywhere

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implies that self-consciousness about such a process is all that the vaunted Absolute Knowledge is all about. In fact, it is especially important to note that Hegels formulations of this final self-consciousness expressly denies any sort of systematic closure or static finality.6 On Pippins interpretation, as Dulckeit notes, Hegels philosophy does not, and cannot, succeed in closing the gap between mind and the world.7 According to Dulckeit: This might well vindicate the post-modernists among us who feel most cheered at the sight of the abyss. But for others it might be a matter of concern (PHI, pp. 9091). That the rupture between mind and world is irreducible ceases to be a matter of concern once it is seen that Hegel not only read Kant. He also read Lacan. Rereading Hegel? The first method he conceived was relatively simple. Know Spanish well, recover the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or the Turk, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918, be Miguel de Cervantes. Pierre Menard studied this procedure . . . but discarded it as too easy. Rather as impossible! my reader will say. Granted, but the undertaking was impossible from the very beginning and of all the impossible ways of carrying it out, this was the least interesting. To be, in the twentieth century, a popular novelist of the seventeenth seemed to him a diminution. To be, in some way, Cervantes and reach the Quixote seemed less arduous to him and, consequently, less interesting than to go on being Pierre Menard and reach the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard. . . . My undertaking is not difficult, essentially, I read in another part of his letter. I should only have to be immortal to carry it out. Shall I confess that I often imagine he did finish it and that I read the Quixote all of it as if Menard had conceived it?8 Naturally, it is astounding to learn that Hegel read Lacan, but Hegel is a Schwabian and startling people is his passion, just as it is the passion of all Schwabians.9 That Hegel read Lacan becomes less shocking when it is recalled that Hegels reading was not limited to the history of philosophy. Hoy watches Hegel reading Rawls, Cutrofello sees that he read Foucault, Hanna recognizes that he read Quine, Maker observes him reading Marx, Dulckeit perceives that he read Russell, and Schwartz discovers that he read Gauthier.10 Indeed, having noted that Russells notion of knowledge by acquaintance provides a deserving foil for Hegels arguments against sense-certainty, only prejudice causes Solomon to add the caveat that whether or not Russell ever

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read his Hegel, it is almost as if per impossible, Hegel knew his Russell.11 As if, sir? Nay, it is.12 In claiming that Hegel read Lacan, reference is made, not to the work, but rather to the text. This distinction is articulated by Barthes: The work is a fragment of substance, occupying a portion of the space of books (in a library, for example), the Text is a methodological field. The opposition may recall (without at all reproducing term for term) Lacans distinction between reality and the real: the one is displayed, the other demonstrated; likewise, the work can be seen (in bookshops, in catalogues, in exam syllabuses), the text is a process of demonstration, speaks according to certain rules (or against certain rules); the work can be held in the hand, the text is held in language, only exists in the movement of discourse (or rather, it is Text for the very reason that it knows itself as text); the Text is not the decomposition of the work, it is the work that is the imaginary tail of the Text; or again, the Text is experienced only in an activity of production. It follows that the Text cannot stop (for example, on the library shelf); its constitutive movement is that of cutting across (in particular, it can cut across the work, several works).13 Confusions result when the works materiality is identified with the texts ideality. To speak Hegelese, if the work remains a fragment of substance, the text is subject as well as substance, pure, simple negativity. As such, the text is the process of its own becoming, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal, having its end also as its beginning; and only by being worked out to its end, is it actual (PS, 18, p. 10). In any event, there is nothing untoward in thinking that Hegel read Lacans text, although the notion that Hegel had access to Lacans work is paradoxical.14 Reading Hegel reading subsequent philosophers involves reading anachronistically. Anachronism usually is regarded as a simple mistake in temporal sequence, a matter of chronologically misplacing persons, objects, or events. Nevertheless, discerning that philosophy is the process which begets and traverses its own moments, and this whole movement constitutes what is positive [in it] and its truth, Hegel also perceives that this truth therefore includes the negative also, what would be called the false, if it could be regarded as something from which one might abstract (PS, 47, p. 27; bracketed terms in book). Far from immediately rejecting anachronism as a mistake, this error must be catechized to reveal its truth. Anachronism is said to occur when readers impose concerns foreign to the authors intentions, and alien to the historical context. Rather than bringing their questions and issues to the text, it is asserted, readers should approach it in its own terms. It is obvious that such formulations cannot escape the charge

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of anachronism. This is not to deny that distinctions can be drawn between what authors intended, what earlier readers understood, and what contemporary readers regard as significant. Those distinctions, however, are aspects of the interpretive strategies employed in reading. Authors intentions, earlier understandings, and contemporary significance the content for each of these is supplied by the text. Even granting that the texts meaning is linked to authorial intention, for example, intentions never are discovered. Rather, intentions are constructed. Rockmore notes: The main clue to authorial intention is often the very texts that require interpretation. In the main, it is not possible to separate between the intention that supposedly guides the interpretation of the text and the text for which it is the guide.15 The meaning of the text cannot be based upon an authors intentions because those intentions are inferred from the meaning of the text. In this precise sense, there is nothing outside of the text [there is no outside-text; il ny a pas de hors-texte].16 Consequently, authorial intention cannot constrain the meaning of the text. Instead, it is the text that constrains accounts of the authors intentions. Reading structures authorial intention, as well as the concerns regarded as alien to it. Anachronism is not an error to be avoided, but a necessary and ineluctable consequence of reading. In spite of this, anachronistic reading has its opponents. For example, although the goal of Gillian Roses Hegel Contra Sociology is to retrieve Hegelian speculative experience for social theory, Rose immediately adds that this retrieval will not occur by means of any ingenuous and ahistorical return to Hegel, but, first of all, by recognizing and discussing the intellectual and historical barriers which stand in the way of any such rereading.17 That a return to Hegel necessarily consists of an intense project of reading and rereading should be obvious in light of the returns to Marx, Freud, and Lacan illustrated nicely by such titles as Reading Capital, Reading Freud, and Reading Lacan.18 Nevertheless, Roses resistance to an ingenuous and ahistorical return is itself the fundamental barrier to rereading. Indeed, any return must be ingenuous and ahistorical since all reading is anachronistic. This is so because as will be demonstrated it is reading which retroactively constitutes the texts context, author, and so the text itself. Lacans return to Freud is not a simple regression back to a stable point earlier along a set line of development, but rather the retroactive effect of Lacans teaching (RL, p. 90). Just so, the return to Hegel will have constituted the Hegel who returns. Reading anachronistically is unavoidable. The difference is not between anachronistic and achronistic readings, but between readings which admit their anachronism, and those which do not.19 Hence, the scholarly approach which would claim to return to the text by adopting a passive attitude in order to

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permit the text to speak is not wholly false. What it fails to discern, however, is that this alleged passive attitude is only made possible by its own active, albeit disavowed, intervention. Roses notion that reading requires that the text be situated in a context is not incorrect. What must be added, however, is that the context does not exist prior to reading. Reading structures a context in which the text then is situated. More precisely, reading will have structured a context in which the text will have been situated. Since context is a result of reading, and not its presupposition, all reading worthy of the name is anachronistic. Reading a text creates a context. It then appears that this context places restrictions on the range of interpretations which will be acceptable. So it does, but what must not be lost sight of is that these restrictions are the result of certain interpretive principles. Change those principles read otherwise and the context and restrictions will change as well. Reading otherwise necessarily happens, and so reading always is transformational. This does not mean, of course, that anything goes. As Derrida perceives, there must be protocols which govern the transformational process of reading, although he admits to not finding any which are satisfactory.20 Protocols are not found. Instead, reading creates the protocols which will have been the criteria which governed its transformational operations. Rather than existing prior to the reading and merely waiting passively to be discovered, protocols of meaning are constructed in the process of reading. In turn, these protocols retroactively govern will have governed the reading which produced them. Lacan laments that such awe seizes man when he unveils the lineaments of his power that he turns away from it in the very action employed to lay its features bare. So it has been with psychoanalysis.21 Like Rose, many also turn away from the implications of anachronistic reading, fancying that reading must be constrained by a context that already is given. This evasion is not innocent. Rather, it is a blindness which refuses to recognize that, as seen above, the constraints which reading encounters are its product. That failure is analogous to the Hegelian beautiful souls unwillingness to see that it actually authors the wicked world in which it finds itself: The falsity of the beautiful soul lies not in its inactivity, in the fact that it only complains of a depravity without doing something to remedy it; it consists, on the contrary, in the very mode of activity implied by this position of inactivity in the way the beautiful soul structures the objective social world in advance so that it is able to assume, to play in it the role of the fragile, innocent and passive victim.22

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Not only is reading always anachronistic, but all reading is rereading. Rereading not only involves reading again, it also means reading differently. Every reading is different from earlier readings, if for no other reason than that every reading is a response to earlier readings. Moreover, since the context emerges from reading, there never will be a first, originary reading. It would be a mistake, though, to conclude from this that the resources reading employs are provided by earlier readings. Those resources will have come from the future, since they will have been the result of reading itself. Sternes bold identification of writing and conversation provides additional evidence of readings creative powers: Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation: As no one, who knows what he is about in good company, would venture to talk all; so no author, who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good breeding, would presume to think all: The truest respect which you can pay to the readers understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself.23 According to this passage, reading does not observe passively what the author has created. Instead, just as the dialectical interaction of speaker and hearer makes a conversation, so Sterne has author and reader together creating the text. Readers must, as Lacan says, contribute something of their own [y mettre du sien].24 Left at this level, it would appear that reading alone does not constitute the text, but instead that reading and authoring together perform that task. To avoid that misperception, what must be added is that reading constitutes both text and context, because it also creates the author. The proof of this is contained in Borges story, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. Borges recognizes that the Quixote can be read as if it were written long ago by Cervantes, or as though it were authored recently by Menard. Borges also perceives that there are significant differences between their respective versions: It is a revelation to compare Menards Don Quixote with Cervantes. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine): . . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and advisor to the present, and the futures counselor. Written in the seventeenth century, written by the lay genius Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

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. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and advisor to the present, and the futures counselor. History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. The final phrases exemplar and advisor to the present, and the futures counselor are brazenly pragmatic. (L, p. 43). In principle, this method of reading, as Borges sees, could be extended to any text: Menard (perhaps without wanting to) has enriched, by means of a new technique, the halting and rudimentary art of reading: this new technique is that of the deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution. This technique, whose applications are infinite, prompts us to go through the Odyssey as if it were posterior to the Aeneid and the book Le jardin du Centaure of Madame Henri Bachelier as if it were by Madame Henri Bachelier. This technique fills the most placid works with adventure. To attribute the Imitation Christi to Louis Ferdinand Cline or to James Joyce, is this not a sufficient renovation of its tenuous spiritual indications? (L, p. 44) The most brazen suggestion, perhaps, is that Bacheliers Le jardin du Centaure be read as if its author were Bachelier.25 Tarrying with the notion that two independent entities, reader and author, jointly create the text reflects insufficient perspicacity. It is reading that constructs the author. Does it need to be added that reading also constitutes the reader? What has been presented in the previous paragraphs is a progression that proceeded by dialectical negation. It began by assuming that author, text, context, and reader were independent entities which were involved with each other in a purely external manner. Second, a distinction was made between the text and book. The book is a physical object, whereas the text is a methodological field. Third, it was shown that anachronistic reading is unavoidable because it is the text which supplies the context, authorial intention, the response of the earliest readers, and the contemporary significance. Fourth, it was shown that the protocols of reading retroactively govern the reading which produced them. Fifth, turning to Sterne, it appeared that reading and authoring together constitute the text. Sixth, that position was sublated by examining Borges proof that reading creates the author. Finally, it was seen that reading creates the reader too. Each of the these moments could be viewed as rungs on a ladder that leads to a final comprehension of reading. Wittgenstein writes: My propositions

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serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them as steps to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.26 This is not the case here. After the ladder has been climbed, the rungs are not recognized as nonsensical. For every rung contains truth as well as error, each higher rung preserves the truth of the previous one, and the top of the ladder just is the recognition of the result of the process involved in reaching it. Nor can the ladder be discarded after it has been climbed, since there is no other place on which to stand. The climber must remain standing, so to speak, on the top rung of the ladder. It is not a matter of transcending the rungs, but instead seeing them aright, in their proper relation to each other. Or, if this way of expressing the point is preferred, transcending the rungs consists in seeing them aright. This permits a return to an issue addressed earlier. Is it a consequence of the theory of reading articulated above that anything goes? Anything does go, but only in the sense that the results of reading cannot be predicted in advance. Since it has been demonstrated that text, reader, meaning, context, author, and so forth are constituted through and in the activity of reading, it follows that what these will be better, will have been can be discovered only by reading. The worry that the text might be made to say whatever the reader wishes to hear is an anxiety that is possible only by presupposing that the reader is an independent agent, existing separately from the act of reading. This has been shown to be false. If further proof is required, an experiment should suffice. Pick any text, and then see if it can be made to say just anything. But be careful! What the text does say in response to such discourtesy may not be pleasing or genteel. And it may bite. The end of history? Wiener posits two beings each of whose temporal dimensions moves in the opposite direction from the other. To be sure, that means nothing, and that is how things which mean nothing all of a sudden signify something, but in a quite different domain. If one of them sends a message to the other, for example a square, the being going in the opposite direction will first of all see the square vanishing, before seeing the square. That is what we see as well. The symptom initially appears to us as a trace, which will only ever be a trace, one which will continue not to be understood until the analysis has got quite a long way, and until we have realized its meaning.27

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Plant, Kojve, Fukuyama, and Cooper all claim that, for Hegel, history is over.28 It may then be urged, as in Fukuyamas The End of History and the Last Man, that fundamental advancement beyond present social conditions is impossible. What such interpretations overlook is that Hegel read Lacan. Because Hegel is a Lacanian, the future always is radically contingent, openended, and not-yet. The evidence for this is found in the uncanny transversal of the Hegelian dialectic and the Lacanian symptom. Hegel writes of the end of history and of spirit concluding its development in absolute knowing, obviously, but how are these pronouncements to be read? They demonstrate that at the end of history lies to use the words of Chancellor Gorkon of the Klingon High Council the undiscovered country, the future.29 Hegels dialectic is a technique which is applied retrospectively.30 The dialectic is not a mechanism for predicting what the next moment must be. Instead, after the next moment has occurred, the dialectic explains why the former moment of spirit was necessary. More precisely, the dialectic is that explanation. The necessity at issue here is not logical necessity, but narrational necessity. In order to make sense of its sojourn, spirit narrates a story explaining that its various moments were leading to its present result. What Gould claims for historical explanations and the laws of nature also holds for dialectical necessity: Historical explanations take the form of narrative: E, the phenomenon to be explained, arose because D came before, preceded by C, B, and A. If any of these earlier stages had not occurred, or had transpired in a different way, then E would not exist (or would be present in a substantially altered form, E, requiring a different explanation). Thus, E makes sense and can be explained rigorously as the outcome of A through D. But no law of nature enjoined E; any variant E arising from an altered set of antecedents, would have been equally explicable, though massively different in form and effect.31 It is correct to say that spirits journey is teleological, but it must be remembered that this teleology is a rational reconstruction that then is retrospectively projected on its history. In other words, the teleology that drives spirit forward is not a push from the past, but a pull from the future. That pull, however, is nothing more than the effect of the story spirit will have told itself. The necessity of spirits moments is the result of the narrative that will have been told about them. Goldstein perceives this when he maintains that what is logically contingent vis vis the concept at one stage of its history, is seen to be not contingent, but as having contributed a retrospectively-necessary component to the emergence of the subsequent stage (FIW, p. 18). Spirit is retrospective, and dialectical necessity is retroactive. Spirit always gets where it is

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going, but spirit is not following a pre-existing teleology. In retrospect, spirit sees that where it now is always was its goal, and thus its narrative is one of following a pre-existing teleology. Spirit always moves forward. Nevertheless, it essentially is retroactive. To understand this further, it is useful to refer to qieks explication of the Lacanian concept of the symptom and its repression: The Lacanian answer to the question: From where does the repressed return? is therefore, paradoxically: From the future. Symptoms are meaningless traces, their meaning is not discovered, excavated from the hidden depth of the past, but constructed retroactively the analysis produces the truth; that is, the signifying frame which gives the symptoms their symbolic place and meaning. As soon as we enter the symbolic order, the past is always present in the form of historical tradition and the meaning of these traces is not given; it changes continually with the transformations of the signifiers network. Every historical rupture, every advent of a new master-signifier, changes retroactively the meaning of all tradition, restructures the narration of the past, makes it readable in another, new way. (SOI, pp. 5556) To read this correctly, it is necessary to displace linear notions of time, and instead to conceive of temporality as multidirectional and discontinuous. Whatever truth there may be to the assertion that mechanical causes must precede their effects, in the symbolic realm backward causation is the rule.32 Even in those cases where it appears that a cause has preceded its effect, closer scrutiny often will reveal that the effect was the cause of its cause. Lacan recognizes that the meaning of repressions symptoms come from the future. Prior to the patients psychoanalysis, what will have been diagnosed as the symptoms of repression are not yet symptoms. Rather, they are meaningless traces which await their psychoanalytic reading. Indeed, these meaningless traces only exist because of the retroactive effect of the psychoanalysis in which they will have been recognized as symptoms. Put otherwise, the meaningless traces only appear at all because their meaning already is anticipated. What must not be lost sight of, though, is that anticipation is itself a result of the analysis which will have occurred. Anticipation does not occur prior to the psychoanalysis, but rather at its completion. It then is retroactively projected into a past where it will have occurred before the psychoanalysis. That Hegel relies on Lacans symptom when formulating his dialectic becomes clear once several distinctions, introduced by Laclau and Mouffe, are employed: We will call articulation any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice.

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The structured totality resulting from the articulatory practice, we will call discourse. The differential positions, insofar as they appear articulated within a discourse, we will call moments. By contrast, we will call element any difference that is not discursively articulated.33 What is this but a description, mutatis mutandis, of the workings of the dialectic? These meaningless traces are elements that must be inserted into a symbolic order in which they then will be articulated as moments. It would be a mistake, however, to believe that these elements existed prior to their articulation as moments. Rather, only after they become moments within a symbolic order do they also retrospectively appear as unarticulated elements. As is apparent, elements only become moments as a result of the psychoanalysis, but they also only become what they already were as its result. This point is made by Gallop when she writes of the subject that the significance of his past is dependent upon revelation in the future, and it is only as significant experience that any past can be his past, his experience, the accomplishment of a subject(RL, p. 84). Only at the conclusion do they retroactively become what they always were already moments which were meaningless elements. The advocates of historys end are correct in claiming that the resources for radical change are not present now, but they fail to see that those resources will have been present as a result of radical change. The future is not possible now, for Hegel, although it will have been after it becomes real.34 Put otherwise, events create their own causes. qiek also recognizes this: This, then, is Hegels fundamental lesson: when we are active, when we intervene in the world through a particular act, the real act is not this particular, empirical, factual intervention (or non-intervention); the real act is of a strictly symbolic nature, it consists in the very mode in which we structure the world, our perception of it, in advance, in order to make our intervention possible, in order to open in it the space for our activity (or inactivity). The real act thus precedes the (particular-factual) activity; it consists in the previous restructuring of our symbolic universe into which our (factual, particular) act will be inscribed. (SOI, p. 216) To see that there is no contradiction between saying that the meaning of events comes from the future and that the real act precedes the activity, it is necessary again to introduce temporal indices. The activity becomes meaningful retrospectively. The activitys meaning is discerned in hindsight. This meaning then is retrospectively projected back as the context in which the activity will have occurred. The discernment of an activitys meaning is itself another activity, and so the meaning of that discernment remains in the future, waiting still another discernment. In addition, the subjects activity elicits the re-

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sponse of the other, and this latter response too elicits further responses. Since there will be no final response, it is obvious that the ultimate meaning of the activity will be deferred forever. Put otherwise, the activity can have no final meaning. The activitys meaning is never fixed since a subsequent response may alter it. Critics might reply that the above line of reasoning applies only to epochal history, but not to absolute history. According to Berthold-Bond, there is a strongly entrenched ambiguity and ambivalence in Hegels philosophy between two opposed ways of describing the End, or completion of history: what I will refer to as the absolutist and the epochal readings.35 BertholdBond writes: What does Hegel mean when he speaks of the End, the completion, the conclusion, the consummation, the fulfillment, of history and knowledge? There seem to be two basic alternatives: either the completion Hegel speaks of is absolute or it is not. That is, either Hegels eschatological vision is of a completely final End, where no further progress in history or knowledge is possible, or it is an epochal conception, where the completion he speaks of is the fulfillment of an historical epoch, leaving the future open to progress. (HEV, p. 15) The meaning of epochal history only is discerned at an epochs consummation, and its end represents the beginning of a new epoch. Nevertheless, in absolute history, it might be claimed, the future finally would arrive, and become an eternal present. There no longer would be the possibility of another epoch. Progress, development, and change would cease, and would be replaced by the same-old same-old. The meaning of all activity would be given at last. The future no longer would represent infinite possibility, but rather depleted actuality. What occurs at the moment of absolute knowing? The traditional answer is that absolute knowing is the complete identification of knower and known, and the total correspondence between subject and object. Each previous stage of consciousness sought to unite the in-itself and the for-itself (the in-itself for consciousness). Absolute knowing, it is said, represents the realization of that desire, when consciousness becomes aware that it is what it sought, the happy moment when the in-itself and the for-itself finally coincide. To pick an example at random, Bowie claims that the destination towards which the mobile and variously self-divided consciousness relentlessly tends is not simply that of a final inclusiveness, a condition in which all its previous and all its potential states survive in harmony, but that of a union, at last consummated, with Spirit at large.36

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Cest magnifique, mais ce nest pas Hegel! For Hegel, the future remains open. The end always is that of some particular historical epoch, there is never any final end where further history or knowledge becomes impossible. There is neither ambiguity nor ambivalence between the absolute and the epochal. The absolute is not opposed to the epochal, but instead represents its proper reading. Rather than absolute knowing being the correspondence of subject and object, or the identification of knower and known, it is the awareness of the unbridgeable chasm that separates them. While this could be proven by another detour through Lacan, Verene has independently arrived at the same conclusion.37 Verene recognizes that the and in the in- and for-itself is what each previous stage of consciousness attempted to suppress, overcome, and forget: Each stage of consciousness fails because it forgets about the and. It fails to recall the presence of andness in the structure in and for itself. It only recalls the two extremes and searches for their union (HR, pp. 106107). Only at the stage of absolute knowing does consciousness see that the in-itself and the for-itself do not possess something in common which would permit their unification. The in-itself and the for-itself cannot be unified, they only can be conjoined: Absolute knowing is the attainment of the wisdom of which no other stage is capable namely, that the and is real(HR, p. 116). Absolute knowing is the recognition that objects and their concepts never will coincide, and that concepts never are identical with themselves. Verene writes: The in itself and the in itself for consciousness that is for itself, these two moments, are held together by nothing; but they always, that is, by necessity, accompany each other. One is the meaning of the other. What is absolute is not something that as unity is their goal, an end point of oneness toward which they develop. What is absolute is what is between them the absolute gap that separates them as absolute moments. . . . Absolute knowing is the recognition, the recollection of the and, the und, in the combination An- und Frsichsein. The absolute is not a goal of this doubletermed expression. The absolute is what is between the two terms, the absolute distance that cannot be reduced between them. (HR, p. 107) Absolute knowing does not represent the identity of the in-itself and the foritself, but instead the realization that there is an irreducible gap between them. Neither be reduced, or made isomorphic, to the other. The in-itself and the foritself can only be linked together by the and.38 This reading is totally unacceptable, critics might insist, because skepticism would result if objects and their concepts never coincide. If the object and its concept do not match, then the object cannot be known as it is in-itself, but only as it is for-consciousness. Any reading which entails that absolute knowing is a species of skepticism, these critics contend, must be rejected.

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Dealing with such naysayers would require digressing from the discussion of absolute and epochal history. Hence, it is tempting to dodge their gripe as being outside this articles scope, referring them to discussions of Hegel and skepticism in the secondary literature.39 Perhaps, just this once, temptation should be resisted. In a word, Hegel is a fallabilist. His goal in the Phenomenology of Spirit is not to show that objects can be known as they are, independent of the process of knowing. That would entail knowing objects as they are when unknown, and that would mean not to know them. He recognizes that such a project is incoherent. Nevertheless, Hegel does accept that objects exist independently of the knowing process. Persons interact with objects and so learn about them. As they continue to interact, they learn even more, especially when the objects do not behave as expected. It is knowledge of the object as it is in-itself-for-consciousness. A reasonable skeptic always can doubt the adequacy of any claim to knowledge. This is sensible because it is clear what should be done in response interact and experiment further in order to discover whether the putative knowledge is adequate. This sort of skepticism is compatible with absolute knowing. Indeed, this is Hegels own procedure when he presents a moment of spirit, discusses its limitation, discerns which of its aspects are nonetheless correct, and then proceeds to its successor moment where that particular limitation is overcome. Suppose, though, that the skeptic goes further, asserting that the object as it is in-itself may be wholly unlike what it is for-consciousness. One of the goals of Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit is to show that nothing can motivate this extreme skeptical doubt. Why not? Because, as Verene claims, the object as it is in-itself is the meaning of the object as it is for-consciousness, and vice versa. What does that mean? It means that any talk of the one must refer to the other. The object as it is in-itself and as it is for-consciousness are mutually codetermining. By highlighting our actual cognitive relation to the world, Westphal writes, Hegel attempts to show that any conception of knowledge which results in skepticism is a conception of knowledge which fails to account for our manifest knowledge of the world (HER, p. 101). Extreme skeptics who would urge that the object as it is initself could be completely other than what it is for-consciousness literally cannot say what they mean. Absolute knowing recognizes that the and in the in- and for-itself is irreducible. Having explained that absolute knowing allows for reasonable skepticism but rejects extreme skepticism, it is time to return to the discussion of absolute and epochal history. The critics, though, will not allow that discussion to continue. They stamp their feet, shout, and interrupt. Even if the above explanation were accepted without further objection, they fume, an unacceptable form of skepticism still

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results from the claim that concepts are never identical with themselves. This is so, they insist, because if a concept lacks the property of self-identity, then knowledge becomes impossible. This objection overlooks Hegels understanding of identity. Again, one of the goals of the Phenomenology of Spirit is to show that identity always encompasses difference because all determination is negation. Specifying what a concept is, making it determinate, requires distinguishing that concept from what it is not. The more concepts from which a concept is distinguished, the more determinate it is. As additional concepts are introduced, from which it then is distinguished, that concept becomes more determinate than before. That is, the identity of the concept changes. This is why the essence of a concept is, for Hegel, comprehended in the recollection of the history of that concepts determinations, its changes of identity. As a consequence, identity always is an external relation, since what a concept is results from contrasting it with other concepts which it is not. The True is the whole, for Hegel. (PS, 20, p. 11). That is, full determination of any particular concept could occur only if it were distinguished from all other concepts. He immediately adds, though, that the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development (PS, 20, p. 11). Thus, as already noted, the essence of a concept is the history of its determinations. Since the whole is itself reconfigured with every moment of spirit, a concepts essence never is fully given. What a concept may become cannot be known, but it can be known what it has been. The process by which a concept becomes determinate also can be known. Skeptics are correct in maintaining that a concept always remains only partially determinate, and that its identity will change if the other concepts with which it is contrasted alter or if new concepts are introduced. The skeptics err, however, if they conclude that partial determination is the same as none at all. Here is a test. They will agree that they lack total cognitive access to the Hegelian whole, yet they can comprehend the following sentence: It is time to return to the discussion of absolute and epochal history! Absolute history does not refer to the termination of all further epochal histories. Rather, it is the recognition that the necessity which will have produced a particular moment is the creation of that moments retrospective gaze. Hence, Hegelian necessity is not absolute, but contingent. The whole course of history, as well as the necessity that produced it, changes with every moment of spirit. Rereading Hegel (reprise)? Because Hegel proceeds by showing, where we are supposed to reap the philosophical benefits of those displays, even though often we can only do

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so by being far more sophisticated about those displays and the principles displayed than the observed form of consciousness itself, the line between what is strictly speaking to be found in his text and what we may only be able to be read into or out of it simply may not exist. (Westphal, HER, p. 139) As argued above, absolute completion is not opposed to the epochal. Rather, it is the proper reading of the epochal. Absolute completion is not the termination or cessation of all future epochal fulfillments, but instead the recognition and comprehension of the process itself. The relation of absolute and epochal completion, then, is not one of simple opposition, but instead mutual determination. Closure itself, paradoxically, is the condition of the possibility of the historys continual openness. To simply oppose an open to a closed dialectic immediately indicates a distance from Hegels dialectic. For Hegel, the dialectic can only be open by being closed. Put otherwise, the moment of closure in Hegels dialectic is the moment when the mechanism of its remaining open is comprehended. These claims may be fine in practice, an indefatigable critic might counter, but how does this work in theory? Put otherwise, what evidence is there, internal to Hegels texts, which would corroborate the claims that have been made? Berthold-Bond maintains that any attempt to harmonize the absolutist and epochal readings must inevitably fall into confusion (HEV, p. 28). What must be shown, then, is that the absolutist and epochal readings can be harmonized without lapsing into confusion. The position articulated here is to be distinguished from one perhaps, since this article proceeds dialectically, inadvertently suggested in the previous section which would assert that there could be, for Hegel, a relative absolute. Such a claim is advanced by Miller when he urges that Hegels doctrine of epochs suggests that there may be a number of culminations and (as the corresponding forms of self-consciousness) relative absolutes. Miller reasons that, if Hegels doctrine of epochs is right, the inescapable conclusion must be that a way opens to the possibility that the achievement of absolute knowledge, or the concept, whereas absolute in the sense that it relativizes to itself all that precedes it, may also be partial in relation to a still more comprehensive standpoint that is yet to reveal itself.40 Millers view falls into confusion for the reason given by Berthold-Bond: To speak of an absolute End of the progression which is nevertheless always relative to a further development, where absolute has the usual connotation of being non-relative and if it does not, then the absolutist interpretation simply collapses into the epochal reading, where there are continually reappearing absolutes, each relative to the close of a given

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era of history is to be forced into the uncomfortable position where, as Hegel says in another context, we cannot say what we mean to say. . . . (HEV, p. 28) It will be argued that the absolute End of the progression is not relative to a further development, but rather consists in the recognition of the necessity of further developments, and that these developments can be described in a narrative which, retrospectively, exhibits their necessity. To anticipate. Conceding that he certainly could imagine historical change occurring under an essentially unchanging guiding logos, Berthold-Bond nevertheless urges that this interpretation just does not seem to accord with Hegels notion that the fulfillment of the telos of a shape of spirit signals the death of that shape, the rejection of that state and its transition to a higher. (HEV, p. 28). It is here that the location of the absolute End of the progression is missed. The absolute End of the progression is the recognition that the fulfillment of the telos of one of spirits shapes results in its death and rejection, followed by spirits transition to a higher shape. The absolute End of the progression denotes a statement expressing the comprehension of the pattern of historical progression, not an event in history. It is not contained in the referent of the enunciation, but rather it is the enunciation itself. Put otherwise, the absolute end is not a signified which would be exterior to Hegels retrospective narration, but instead consists in the moment of recognition about the actual status and import of the signifier. As Lacan says in another context: That is precisely what I mean, and say for what I mean, I say. . . .41 This section will examine the main passages in which claims to an absolute completion are typically located. It is not in dispute that Hegel also speaks of epochal completions. In the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, for example, he writes: The history of spirit is its own deed; for spirit is only what it does, and its deed is to make itself in this case as spirit the object of its own consciousness, and to comprehend itself in its interpretation of itself to itself. This comprehension is its being and principle, and the completion of an act of comprehension is at the same time its alienation [Entuerung] and transition. To put it in formal terms, the spirit which comprehends this comprehension anew and which and this amounts to the same thing returns into itself from its alienation, is the spirit at a stage higher than that at which it stood in its earlier [phase of] comprehension.42 Hence, such passages will not be discussed. What is at issue is whether those passages in which Hegel speaks of an absolute completion of history are to be read as the recognition and comprehension of the process of Spirits his-

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torical development, rather than the end of all future epochal fulfillments. For the sake of comparison, the passages discussed will be those to which BertholdBond refers (HEV, p. 15). Readers wishing to avoid the labor of the concept and attendant travel along the way of despair, preferring their philosophy to come like a shot from a pistol, may skip to the next section. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Berthold-Bond notes, Hegel criticizes Fichtes philosophy because there the ego perpetually posits the nonego, thereby producing merely an alteration between self-consciousness and the consciousness of another, and the constant progression of this alteration, which never reaches any end. Shortly afterward, Hegel complains that Fichtes theory of knowledge regards the struggle of the ego with the object as that of the continuous process of determining the object through the ego as subject of consciousness, without the identity of the restful self-developing Concept.43 While it is clear that Hegel rejects any constant progression which never reaches any end and that he emphasizes the importance of the identity of the restful self-developing concept, these passages do not, by themselves, clarify the nature of that end or what is meant by the identity of the concept. Hence, they are compatible with the interpretation advanced here, namely, that the end the concepts identity consists in the recognition and narration of the trajectory and meaning spirits sojourn, not that it now has stopped. Berthold-Bond refers to seven additional passages three from The Encyclopedia Logic, three from the Phenomenology of Spirit, and one from the Philosophy of History that must be discussed in this context. First, in a discussion of the biblical myth of the Fall in the Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel claims that the rupture between an initial state of innocence and the subsequent fall from that condition has to be sublated in a final concord, a resulting union of spirit with itself. He writes: Let us now consider the myth of the Fall more closely. . . . What is expressed here is the general relationship of cognition to the spiritual life. In its immediate shape spiritual life appears first as innocence and simple trust; but it is of the essence of spirit to sublate this immediate state, since spiritual life distinguishes itself from natural life, and more precisely from the life of animals, by the fact that it does not abide in its being-in-itself, but is for itself. In like manner, however, this stage of schism must itself be sublated in turn, and spirit must return through its own agency to union with itself. This resulting union is a spiritual one, and the guiding principle of that return lies in thinking itself. It is thinking that both inflicts the wound and heals it again.44 What is at stake here is Hegels belief that this resulting union will be a product of spirits labour and culture (EL, 24 Addition 2, p. 62). Spirits schism

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with itself is overcome when spirit not only recognizes that it is its own product and creation, but also comprehends how that has occurred. Nothing here suggests that spirits activity ceases as a result of its spiritual union with itself. Rather, that union consists in the understanding of the process by which spirit recognizes that it is its own creation. In the second passage from The Encyclopedia Logic to be discussed, Hegel writes: The finitude of purpose consists in the fact that, in its realisation, the material used as means is only externally subsumed under it and adapted to it. But in fact the object is implicitly the Concept, and when the Concept, as purpose, is realised in the object, this purpose is only the manifestation of the objects own inwardness. So objectivity is, as it were, only a wrapping under which the Concept lies hidden. In the sphere of the finite we can neither experience nor see that the purpose is genuinely attained. The accomplishing of the infinite purpose consists therefore only in sublating the illusion that it has not yet been accomplished. The good, the absolute good, fulfills itself eternally in the world, and the result is that it is already fulfilled in and for itself, and does not need to wait upon us for this to happen. That is the illusion in which we live, and at the same time it is this illusion alone that is the activating element upon which our interest in the world rests. It is within its own process that the Idea produces the illusion for itself; it posits an other confronting itself, and its action consists in sublating that illusion. Only from this error does the truth come forth, and herein lies our reconciliation with error and with finitude. Otherness or error, as sublated, is itself a necessary moment of the truth, which can only be in that it makes itself into its own result. (EL, 212 Addition, p. 286) This passage represents a condensation of many of Hegels views. Briefly, Hegel here affirms his belief that error is not simply a contingent occurrence which might have been avoided with greater thoughtfulness and care. Further, error is not a simply a mistake to be dismissed once the truth is discovered. Rather, error is, in a sense, constitutive of the truth. Any particular position will be one-sided and to that extent in error. Nevertheless, that position is not a mere mistake. Its error lies in taking itself to be the whole truth rather than a partial truth. However, the encountered inadequacies of that partial truth lead to the development of a new more encompassing position which retains the truth contained in the earlier position. This is, of course, Hegels doctrine of determinate negation in a nutshell. The illusion and error referred to in this passage consist in the failure to recognize that the world already contains the good, and that it is not waiting for human strivings to realize this. Again, though, this illusion is not a mistake that could have been avoided, since it is what motivates human action.

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To have escaped this illusion would have been to escape life itself. Further, there is a second sense in which this illusion is not a mere mistake. The insight that the world already contains the good is itself the result of strivings to realize that good. Hence, any attempt to avoid the illusion and reach the truth directly must fail. From the perspective of the finite, it appears as though the concept inadequately captures the features of the object, like a taxonomy which would categorize persons only as animal laborans without recognizing that humans are homo faber, animal rationale, and animal socialis too. From the perspective of the infinite, it is seen that the object always already implicitly instantiates the concept, although it is not until the object is developed fully that this instantiation become explicit. It is clear that this is a latter perspective is retrospective. Only after the object has completed its development can it be seen as what always was. However, what it always was is itself something that only emerges after it has developed. Here is the third passage from The Encyclopedia Logic which BertholdBond mentions: The second sphere develops the relation of the distinct [terms] into what it is initially; i.e., into the contradiction in these [terms] themselves in the infinite progress. This contradiction resolves itself . . . into the end where what is different is posited as what it is in the Concept. This is the negative of what is first, and, in its identity with that, it is the negativity of its own self; hence [it is] the unity within which both of these first [terms] are as ideal and as moments; [they are there] as sublated, i.e., as preserved at the same time. Con-cluding itself with itself in this way from its being-in-itself by means of its difference and through the sublation of this difference, the Concept is the realised Concept; i.e., it is the Concept that contains the positedness of its determinations within its being-for-itself. It is the Idea for which, being what is absolutely first (in the method), this end is at the same time only the vanishing of the semblance that the beginning is something-immediate, and the Idea is a result. This is the cognition that the Idea is the One Totality. (EL, 242, pp. 306307; bracketed terms in book) Although Hegel speaks of the end where what is different is posited as what it is in the Concept, he also refers to this process as one of infinite progress. Although the following point was made in the previous section, it merits repeating in this context too. The end to which Hegel refers is not a substantial, separate thing. It is nothing more than the historical development of its moments and the self-conscious recognition that this movement has not been a series of independent events, but rather a progressive development. As though to prove that those farthest from the light can see most clearly, this point is illustrated in Ryles discussion of the being of Oxford Univer-

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sity. Oxford University is not an institution like Christ Church, Bodleian Library, and Ashmolean Museum. Instead, it is the set of relations that have been established between and among such institutions. Oxford University just is the organization of those institutions, according to Ryle, and not another collateral institution, some ulterior counterpart to the colleges, laboratories and offices.45 Just so, for Hegel the end is the recognition of that process by which its moments have been generated as well as the historical narration of that generation: The Concept is the realised Concept, he explains, the positedness of its determinations within its being-for-itself. Once spirit has understood this process, it reaches an absolute end. This end is not a termination of the process, but the comprehension of it. Spirit always will continue to develop this is why Hegel writes of this process as an infinite progress but it now recognizes itself in and as that progressive procession. Berthold-Bond also refers to three passages from the Phenomenology of Spirit. The first of these is Hegels conclusion to the Introduction. He writes: The experience of itself which consciousness goes through can, in accordance with its Concept, comprehend nothing less than the entire system of consciousness, or the entire realm of the truth of Spirit. For this reason, the moments of the truth are exhibited in their own proper determinateness, viz. as being not abstract moments, but as they are for consciousness, or as consciousness itself stands forth in its relation to them. Thus the moments of the whole are patterns of consciousness. In pressing forward to its true existence, consciousness will arrive at a point at which it gets rid of its semblance of being burdened with something alien, with what is only for it, and some sort of other, at a point where appearance becomes identical with essence, so that its exposition will coincide at just this point with the authentic Science of Spirit. And finally, when consciousness itself grasps this its own essence, it will signify the nature of absolute knowledge itself. (PS, 89, p. 56; translation modified) Here Hegel stresses the importance of comprehending the interrelations and interconnections between all of the moments of consciousness. Whereas the consciousness which exists within each moment what Hegel calls natural consciousness is not aware of the process by which the moments are related to each other, the scientific or phenomenological observer comprehends this process. While the natural consciousness perceives only isolated elements having no connection to each other than mere succession, the phenomenological observer recognizes patterns of consciousness. Further, whereas natural consciousness experiences these elements as something external and alien, the phenomenological observer comprehends them as moments which are constitutive of its own development. Indeed, the phenomenological observer

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understands that it is the result of the progressive development of these moments. Rather than being something external and alien, the phenomenological observer sees that it is the product of these moments. The narration that exposes the process of the progressive development of the moments is the science of spirit. Absolute knowing consists in the realization that the phenomenological observer is the result of the progressive development of these moments, that spirit is the narration that it recounts to itself. Much later, in the section on Absolute Knowing, Hegel writes: As regards the existence of this Concept, Science does not appear in Time and in the actual world before Spirit has attained to this consciousness about itself. As Spirit that knows what it is, it does not exist before, and nowhere at all, till after the completion of its work of compelling its imperfect shape to procure for its consciousness the shape of its essence, and in this way to equate its self-consciousness with its consciousness. Spirit that is in and for itself and differentiated into its moments is a knowing that is for itself, a comprehension in general that, as such, substance has not yet reached, i.e. substance is not in its own self an absolute knowing. (PS, 800, p. 486; translation modified) The reason that science does not appear prior to spirit attaining this consciousness about itself is because science just is that consciousness about itself. Put otherwise, science does not appear in time until spirit has attained consciousness of itself as spirit. Prior to that moment, it is purely imminent. Science is the recognition of the process that has lead to its appearance. Hence, it is not sufficient that the individual moments be recognized, although that surely is necessary. What is required in addition is that the relation of these moments to each other be comprehended. As in the Introduction, spirit becomes explicit and articulated as spirit when it recognizes itself as the exposition of the progressive development of the moments. Several pages after the above quote, to conclude this examination of the three passages from the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel urges: In this knowing, then, Spirit has concluded the movement in which it has shaped itself, in so far as this shaping was burdened with the difference of consciousness [i.e. of the latter from its object], a difference now overcome. Spirit has won the pure element of its existence, the Concept. The content, in accordance with the freedom of its being, is the self-alienating Self, or the immediate unity of self-knowledge (PS, 805, p. 490; bracketed terms in book; translation modified). Spirit is the result of the process by which it is articulated. It now sees that its moments are not something separate from it, but rather that it is the narration of the history of their progression.

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Berthold-Bond also mentions a passage from the Philosophy of History. There, Hegel maintains that the History of the World travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia the beginning.46 Surely, it might be urged, this is evidence that Hegel believes that history is over. It must be conceded that, from a certain viewpoint that of natural consciousness history indeed is over. However, from a slightly different perspective that of the phenomenological observer it finally can begin. As is well known, Hegel divides world history into three periods. First, the oriental world only understands that one person, the sovereign, is free. Second, the Greco-Roman world recognizes that some persons, the citizens, are free. Third, the GermanicEuropean world comprehends that all persons are free. Hegel does not mean, of course, that all persons now actually are free, but rather that spirit has realized that all persons are entitled to freedom. Having comprehended that all persons have a right to freedom, there is no further conceptual advance possible. In this sense, history has ended. This does not mean, however, that there is nothing to be done. What remains is to work out the implications of the realization that all persons have a right to freedom. In the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel argues that each corporation has a number of responsibilities to its members. Among these is the right to protect its members against particular contingencies (EPR, 252, p. 271). Recognizing that civil society creates wealth by means of wealth and that the persons excluded from this cannot earn a living, Hegel not only maintains that persons have a right not to be excluded from the societys wealth. He also calls for the sharing of these assets. In explaining that subjective selfishness turns into a contribution towards the satisfaction of the needs of everyone else through the dependence and reciprocity of work and satisfaction of needs, Hegel claims that each individual must have the opportunity to a share of societys universal and permanent resources (EPR, 199, p. 233). While Hegel does not specify how this should occur, he nevertheless claims that there is a universal right to capitalization.47 Drydyk explains: The industry-wide associations were to meet their responsibilities to protect their members against market contingencies and unemployment by giving them an effective right to capitalization. . . . Individuals have a right to be capitalized for the same reasons that they have rights to education and health care. What is fundamental is their right to their particular satisfaction, their right not to be excluded from the satisfactions offered by the communitys way of life. . . . Hegel considered that rights to capitalization should be an object of universal will because, without them, the right to non-exclusion (from satisfaction in the communitys way of life) could not be institutionalized. (CSCS, pp. 463464)

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Such capitalization was not present in Hegels society, and so his society could not be fully actual. Ditto for today, although there are proposals that approximate Hegels call for capitalization.48 Implementing any of these proposals would involve a substantial, if not fundamental, restructuring of societys political and economic institutions. Hence, it is true that history has ended insofar as it now is recognized that all persons have a right to freedom. History is not over, however, when referring to the task of discerning what all persons having a right to freedom should mean, and then making the required alterations in institutions and attitudes. Similar points could be made, of course, in regards to issues of race, gender, and ethnicity. For example, Gauthier shows that on a Hegelian account, as self-conscious universality develops historically, it reconceptualizes universality.49 As a result, the kind of motivation needed to advance morality may appear entirely immoral and disrespectful towards its law (HFSC, p. 50).50 Hence, the demand of a subordinated class of persons for recognition, while initially appearing to set that class as a particular in opposition to the larger society as the universal, actually is a demand that the previously existing universality be refigured. Again, history has ended in that it has been recognized that, in principle, all persons have a right to freedom. History continues, however, through the task to realize discover and instantiate this principles meaning. The mediator vanishes? In this turning point of the method, the course of cognition at the same time returns to itself. As self-sublating contradiction this negativity is the restoration of the first immediacy, of simple universality; for the other of the other, the negative of the negative, is immediately the positive, the identical, the universal. If one insists on counting, this second immediate is, in the course of the method as a whole, the third term to the first immediate and the mediated. It is also, however, the third term to the first or formal negative and to absolute negativity or the second negative; now as the first negative is already the second term, the term reckoned as third can also be reckoned as fourth, and instead of a triplicity, the abstract form may also be taken as a quadruplicity; in this way, the negative or the difference is counted as a duality. The third or fourth is in general the unity of the first or second moments, of the immediate and the mediated. That it is this unity, as also that the whole form of the method is triplicity, is, it is true, merely the superficial external side of the mode of cognition. (Hegel, SL, p. 836)

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Let it be conceded, a critic might respond, that the above explication is, if not a plausible, then a possible reading of some of Hegels texts. Nevertheless, this critic would continue, that explication must be rejected because it cannot account for the Science of Logic. There Hegel is concerned to develop and present a completed theory of the categories, and to show that the dialectic of spirit follows a necessary sequence. For example, Kolb maintains: The dialectic works through the process Hegel calls determinate negation, and this requires closure. When a category of thought or a structure of action is found to be inadequate, thought or action finds itself already with a new but related category or structure. There is no moment of indeterminacy when the first is negated and we cast around for a substitute. Basic categories or structures are not tools which we can fashion as we please; their inadequacies turn out to be their connections to more encompassing categories. We have no indeterminate space from which we subjectively manipulate or arbitrarily change the fundamental categories and structures. We ourselves are constituted within the process of their interrelation.51 Like Hartmann, Kolb interprets Hegel as providing a theory of categories.52 This is correct as far as it goes. Its limitation consists in its perceiving only three moments in Hegels dialectic. As a result, Kolb is lead to claim that the sequential relation of the three moments is necessary. This interpretation has no time for indeterminacy, no room for contingency. What it overlooks is that Hegelian necessity is catalyzed by a moment of irreducible contingency. It is this moment of contingency which will have determined the features of what later will have been identified as the thesis. Hence, it also will have determined the character of the antithesis. Like the lady in Hitchcocks film, the mediating moment of contingency always vanishes after having done its work, allowing spirit to narrate a story of its necessary moments.53 As qiek recognizes, there are four, not three, moments to Hegels dialectic.54 More accurately, there are four moments in the actualization of the dialectics moments, although only three appear to spirits retrospective gaze. The epigraph from the Science of Logic that heads this section cites Hegels warning against the error of believing that the moments of the dialectic are discrete, and so can be counted. This view is consistent with his position in the Phenomenology of Spirit. There he maintains: In so far as the otherness falls into two parts, Spirit might, as regards its moments if these are to be counted be more exactly expressed as a quaternity in unity or, because the quantity itself again falls into two parts, viz. one part which has remained good and the other which has become evil, might even be expressed as a five-in-one. But to count the moments can be

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reckoned as altogether useless, since in the first place what is differentiated is itself just as much one thing viz. the thought of the difference which is only one thought as it [the differentiated] is this differentiated element, the second relatively to the first. And, secondly, it is useless to count because the thought which grasps the Many in a One must be dissolved out of its universality and differentiated into more than three or four distinct components; and this universality appears, in contrast to the absolute determinateness of the abstract unit, the principle of number, as indeterminateness with respect to number as such, so that we could speak only of numbers in general, i.e. not of a specific number of differences. Here, therefore, it is quite superfluous to think of numbers and counting at all, just as in other respects the mere difference of quantity and amount has no conceptual significance and makes no difference. (PS, 776, p. 469; bracketed terms in book; translation modified) Here is a story everyone has heard: Hegels dialectic has three moments. First, there is the thesis. Then, along comes an antithesis, which challenges the thesis by pointing out its one-sidedness and limitations. In its zeal to point out the errors of the thesis, though, the antithesis also becomes partial in its grasp of the truth. This gives rise to a reconciling synthesis which combines what was correct in the thesis and antithesis, while rejecting their errors. This synthesis, in turn, becomes the new thesis in the next go-around of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Rather than squabbling with these commonplaces, it is more useful to ask how the thesis is initially formulated. From where does that come? The thesis is the retroactive result of the emergence of the antithesis. Only after there is an antithesis does the thesis acquire a determinate character. Prior to the antithesis arrival, to use the distinctions of Laclau and Mouffe presented above, what will become the thesis only is an unarticulated element. When the antithesis appears, the thesis becomes an articulated moment. Put otherwise, the thesis becomes a moment only when it is opposed by its antithesis. The thesis becomes itself because of the antithesis, thereby creating the illusion that the thesis was itself before then too. Logicians frequently assert that it is a trivial truth that a thing is identical to itself. Trivial or not, what Hegel would add is that self-identity always is a tour de lil. Representational painting, for example, emerges as representational painting simultaneously with the advent of nonrepresentational painting. Prior to nonrepresentational painting, artists did not paint representationally. They just painted. Only with the arrival of nonrepresentational painting does it become possible to paint representationally, and to observe retrospectively that previous artists painted that way too. In Hegels dialectic, there is a two-fold moment within the first moment, the thesis, whereby the first moment becomes first. Put otherwise, the first

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never is first. This is so, because what is counted as first already has been prepared and anticipated. So, what is counted as first always already is second, and the second then becomes first. The first moment is not articulated as a moment until it is opposed by the second moment. At that point, an internal clarification and splitting diremption, in Hegelese occurs within the first moment such that the first moment becomes itself. This process explains why there is a core of irreducible contingency located at the core of Hegelian necessity. Indeed, that contingency is the condition of the possibility of necessity. The moment of contingency always vanishes. In the retroactive negation which constitutes the Hegelian dialectic, contingency plays no role other than being its constitutive moment. Hence, the necessity of which Hegel speaks happens only at the formal level, as a description of the abstract process of the dialectic. It would be a mistake to object to this by claiming that Hegel unifies form and content, since that only is to say that he thinks that form without content is empty, and that form only becomes meaningful when it has a content: To count the moments can be reckoned as altogether useless . . . it is quite superfluous to think of numbers and counting at all (PS, 776, p. 469). Future forclosed? One has only to look through the history of science to reach the most probable conclusion: that the shape of things to come is determined by things we do not know today, and by what is unforeseeable.55 At the conclusion of the preface of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel notoriously maintains that philosophy always comes too late to give instruction on what the world ought to be. Calling philosophy the thought of the world, he writes: It appears only at a time when actuality has gone through its formative process and attained its completed state. This lesson of the concept is necessarily also apparent from history, namely that it is only when actuality has reached maturity that the ideal appears opposite the real and reconstructs this real world, which it has grasped in its substance, in the shape of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized, by the grey in grey of philosophy; the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk. (EPR, p. 23) Such passages often are cited in misguided attempts to prove that Hegels philosophy entails an acceptance of a status quo, and so lacks any revolution-

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ary potential. This appears to be Marxs point when he asserts, in the last of the Theses on Feuerbach, that the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.56 Such criticisms forget that the dialectic is retrospective. They are cogent only on the assumption that the future can be summoned, made present, and controlled. Hegel sees that this dream is impossible. This is so because the factors which would need to be controlled appear only in hindsight, too late for philosophy to alter them. Marx also is aware of this when he acknowledges that men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.57 Nevertheless, Hegels perspective still differs from this. Marx believes that a total and scientific understanding of directly encountered circumstances will make possible their replacement with chosen circumstances. There are inherent limitations on this, however, because what is given and transmitted from the past will have been the product of what comes from the future. Put differently, the identification of circumstances depends on interpretive processes. Circumstances exist in the encounter of humans with their environment, but the environment is what they regard as their environment. The point, however, is not that radical change is impossible, but that it occurs necessarily. To comprehend this, it is crucial to recognize why the future is foreclosed. Before explaining this, however, it should be noted that Lacan has functioned as a vanishing mediator. He made possible the reading of Hegel presented here. Having accomplished this, he all but disappeared in the previous two sections of explication and argument. This is as it should be, indeed, as it must be. A reading whose genesis was purely contingent genesis now has acquired, hopefully, all of the accoutrements of necessity. It may even be thought that there was no need to introduce Lacan. After all, the discussion in the previous sections demonstrates that the texts themselves support the claim that Hegels absolute End of the progression refers not to the termination of progress but rather to the comprehension of its pattern. So, who needs Lacan? Hegels texts do support that claim, to be sure, once they are read properly. As long as it is not asked how that reading was possible, Lacans name need not be mentioned. Nevertheless, it would be a gaucherie to conclude without an adieu. This can be done by turning to Lacan, one last time, to learn about the futures foreclosure. Lacan introduces the term foreclosure (forclusion) to explicate Freuds concept of repudiation (Verwerfung). According to Laplanche and Pontalis, foreclosure denotes a specific mechanism held to lie at the origin of the psychotic phenomenon and to consist in a primordial expulsion of a fundamen-

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tal signifier . . . from the subjects symbolic universe.58 Although both foreclosure and repression (Verdrngung) are in the most general sense mechanisms of defense, there are significant differences between them. Strictly speaking, Laplanche and Pontalis write, repression is an operation whereby the subject attempts to repeal, or to confine to the unconscious, representations (thoughts, images, memories) which are bound to an instinct (LPA, p. 390). In contrast to repressed signifiers, in cases of foreclosure the signifiers are not integrated into the subjects unconscious and those signifiers do not return from the inside they re-emerge, rather, in the Real, particularly through the phenomenon of hallucination (LPA, p. 116). The Lacanian Real is that which escapes the realm of the Symbolic. That is, the Real is what cannot be conceptualized or articulated within thought or language. The future is foreclosed, as the advocates of historys end assert, although not in the sense intended. The future is foreclosed because it now cannot be predicted or imagined. Being unable to conceive that future conditions could be different than present circumstances, those advocates conclude that the future will not occur. What must be added is that, although now the future cannot happen, it will have happened. To read correctly the pronouncements about philosophys limitations in the Philosophy of Right, they must be coupled with the claims in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit: It is not difficult to see that ours is the birth-time and period of transition to a new era. Spirit has broken with the world it has hitherto inhabited and imagined, and is of a mind to submerge it in the past, and in the labour of its own transformation. Spirit is indeed never at rest but always engaged in moving forward. . . . The frivolity and boredom which unsettle the established order, the vague foreboding of something unknown, these are the heralds of approaching change. The gradual crumbling that left unaltered the face of the whole is cut short by a sunburst which, in one flash, illuminates the features of the new world. (PS, 11, pp. 67) Truth is not at the bottom of a well, for Hegel, but dwells on the surface. Hence, although it is platitudinous to say that the darkest moment occurs just before dawn, truly reading Hegel requires risking such superficiality. The conditions for the futures emergence, although not existing now, will have been present. Far from being evidence that history has ended, the hallucinatory feelings which accompany thoughts of the futures foreclosure frivolity, boredom, forebodings actually are the heralds of change. Epochal change will occur, and human action can precipitate it. The truth of actions resides in their results, for Hegel, and these results often are at variance with agents desires. As the cunning of reason teaches, radical change is inevitable, although in

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the last instance such change will have been the unintended, unforeseeable, and unanticipated consequences of human will, motivation, and intention. This means that the future always is open, that nothing ever is settled, and that the desire for justice named Marx can continue after Marxism. Far from being an occasion for pessimism and despair, this conclusion will have been experienced as optimistic by those who recognize that liberatory struggles necessarily occur without guarantees.59 Notes
1. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. xxixxii. 2. Compare Dieter Henrich, Hegel im Kontext (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971). 3. Jacques Lacan, crits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1977), p. 174). Compare Georg W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977; abbreviated PS), 85, p. 54: It would seem that consciousness must alter its knowledge to make it conform to the object. But, in fact, in the alteration of knowledge, the object itself alters for it too, for the knowledge that was present was essentially a knowledge of the object: as the knowledge changes, so too does the object, for it essentially belonged to this knowledge. 4. Robert B. Pippin, Hegels Idealism: The Satisfaction of Self-Consciousness (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989; abbreviated HI), pp. 67. 5. Georg W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller (New York: Humanities Press, 1969; abbreviated SL), p. 759; translation modified. 6. Robert B. Pippin, Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 169. 7. Katharina Dulckeit, Review of Robert B. Pippins Hegel Idealism: The Satisfaction of Self-Consciousness, Owl of Minerva 24:1 (1992; abbreviated PHI), p. 90. 8. Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, trans. James E. Irby (New York: New Directions Books, 1964; abbreviated L), p. 40. 9. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hegels Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, trans. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 37. 10. Joyce Beck Hoy, Hegels Critique of Rawls, Clio 10: 4 (1981), pp. 407422. Andrew Cutrofello, A History of Reason in the Age of Insanity: The Deconstruction of Foucault in Hegels Phenomenology, Owl of Minerva 25:1 (1993), pp. 1521. Robert Hanna, From an Ontological Point of View: Hegels Critique of the Common Logic, Review of Metaphysics 40 (December 1986), pp. 305338. William Maker, Hegels Critique of Marx, Hegel and His Critics: Philosophy in the Aftermath of Hegel, ed. William Desmond (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989), pp. 7292. Katharina Dulckeit, Hegels Revenge of Russell: The Is of Identity versus the Is of Predication, Hegel and His Critics, pp. 111131. David T. Schwartz, The Limits of Self Interest: An Hegelian Critique of Gauthiers Compliance Problem, Southwest Philosophy Review 13: 1 (1997), pp. 137147. 11. Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel: A Study of G.W.F. Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 325326.

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12. Compare Bertrand Russell, Seems, Madam? Nay, It Is, Why I am not a Christian: And Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957), pp. 94103. 13. Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), pp. 156157. 14. Paradoxical, but not absurd. See Paul Horwich, Asymmetries in Time: Problems in the Philosophy of Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). 15. Tom Rockmore, Fichtean Circularity, Antifoundationalism, and Groundless System, Idealistic Studies 25: 1 (1995), pp. 107108. 16. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 158. 17. Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Athlone Press, 1981), p. 1. 18. Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1977). Peter Gay, Reading Freud: Explorations and Entertainments (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). Volney Patrick Gay, Reading Freud: Psychology, Neurosis, and Religion (Chico: Scholars Press, 1983). Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985; abbreviated RL). 19. Compare Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 134: We cannot reproach a literature for grafting itself upon a prior violence (for that is always the case); but we can reproach it for not admitting it. 20. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 63: Reading is transformational. . . . But this transformation cannot be executed however one wishes. It requires protocols of reading. Why not say it bluntly: I have not yet found any that satisfy me. 21. Jacques Lacan, Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, trans. Anthony Wilden (Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 1984; abbreviated SLP), p. 3. 22. Slavoj qiek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989; abbreviated SOI), p. 216. 23. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Graham Petrie (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 127. 24. Compare Wilden, Lacan and the Discourse of the Other, in Lacans SLP, p. 311. 25. Borges, Labyrinths, p. 44. In Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Borges writes, the concept of plagiarism does not exist: it has been established that all works are the creation of one author, who is atemporal and anonymous. The critics often invent authors: they select two dissimilar works the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, say attribute them to the same writer and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de lettres. . . . Also, Tlnian books of a philosophical nature invariably include both the thesis and the antithesis, the rigorous pro and con of a doctrine. A book that does not contain its counterbook is considered a failure (L, p. 13). 26. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 6.54, p. 74. 27. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Freuds Papers on Technique, 1953 1954, trans. John Forrester and Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988), p. 159. 28. Raymond Plant, Is There a Future in the Philosophy of History?, Hegels Philosophy of Action, eds. Lawrence S. Stepelevich and David Lamb (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Hu-

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29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

40.

41. 42.

43.

manities Press, 1983), pp. 93102. Alexandre Kojve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lecture on the Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986). Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 1992). Barry Cooper, The End of History: An Essay on Modern Hegelianism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984). J.M. Dillard, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (New York: Pocket Books, 1992), p. 77. For example, see Leon J. Goldstein, Dialectic and Necessity in Hegels Philosophy of History, Substance and Form in History: A Collection of Essays in Philosophy of History, eds. Leon Pompa and William H. Dray (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981), pp. 4257; and Force and the Inverted World in Dialectical Retrospection, International Studies in Philosophy 20: 3 (1988; abbreviated FIW), pp. 1328. Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1989), p. 283. Compare Michael Dummett, Can an Effect Precede its Cause? and Bringing about the Past, Truth and Other Engimas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 319350. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), p. 105. Compare Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (New York: Carol Publishing, 1992), pp. 91106. Daniel Berthold-Bond, Hegels Eschatological Vision: Does History Have a Future?, History and Theory 27: 1 (1988; abbreviated HEV), p. 14. Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 96. Donald Phillip Verene, Hegels Recollection: A Study of Images in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1985; abbreviated HR). Perhaps not independently; since Verene is an astute reader of Hegel, who read Lacan, it should occasion no surprise that he reaches the same conclusion. For a complementary view that further develops Verenes insights, see Walter D. Ludwig, Hegels Conception of Absolute Knowing, Owl of Minerva 21: 1 (1989), pp. 519; and The Method of Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, Owl of Minerva 23: 2 (1992), pp. 165175. See Kenneth R. Westphal, Hegels Epistemological Realism: A Study of the Aim and Method of Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989; abbreviated HER). Also, see Michael N. Forster, Hegel and Skepticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). Mitchell H. Miller, Jr, The Attainment of the Absolute Standpoint in Hegels Phenomenology, The Phenomenology of Spirit Reader: Critical and Interpretive Essays, ed. Jon Stewart (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998), p. 442, note 9. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1978), p. 218. Georg W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991; abbreviated EPR), 343, p. 372; bracketed words in book. Georg W.F. Hegel, Hegels Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E.S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (New York: Humanities Press, 1955), pp. 492, 501; translation modified.

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44. G.W.F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic (with the Zustze): Part I of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences with the Zustze, trans. T.F. Geraets, W.A. Suchting, and H.S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing Co., 1991; abbreviated EL), 24, addition 2, pp. 6162. 45. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1949), p. 16. 46. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), p. 103. 47. Jay Drydyk, Capitalism, Socialism, and Civil Society, The Monist 74: 3, (1991; abbreviated CSCS), p. 464. 48. Compare Bruce A, Ackerman and Anne Alstott, The Stakeholder Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). Also, compare Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Cornel West, The Future of American Progressivism: An Initiative for Political and Economic Reform (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998). 49. Jeffrey A. Gauthier, Hegel and Feminist Social Criticism: Justice, Recognition, and the Feminine (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997; abbreviated HFSC), p. 51. 50. Also see Toula Nicolacopoulos and George Vassilacopoulos, Hegel and the Logical Structure of Love: An Essay on Sexualities, Family and the Law (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 1999). 51. David Kolb, What is Open and What is Closed in the Philosophy of Hegel, Philosophical Topics 19: 2 (1991), p. 34. 52. Compare Klaus Hartmann, Hegel: A Non-Metaphysical View, Hegel: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Alasdair MacIntyre (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976), pp. 101124. 53. Compare Fredric Jameson, The Vanishing Mediator; or, Max Weber as Storyteller, New German Critique 1: 1 (1973), pp. 5289. 54. Compare Slavoj qiek, Why Should a Dialectician Learn to Count to Four?, Radical Philosophy 58 (1991), pp. 39. 55. Stanislaw Lem, His Masters Voice, trans. Michael Kandel (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1983), p. 124. 56. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology: Part One, ed. C.J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1970), p. 121. 57. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1987), p. 15. 58. J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1973; abbreviated LPA), p. 166. 59. Preliminary versions were presented to the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture & Societys annual conference at George Washington University on 8 November 1996, and to the Department of Philosophy at Northern Illinois University of 6 April 1994. Robert C. Scharff and three anonymous reviewers for Continental Philosophy Review are thanked for suggestions which led to useful revisions; every author should be blessed with such readers. William A. Rottschaefer is thanked for comments on the penultimate version. Emily Zakin and Andrew Cutrofello are thanked for advice on an early version. Martin J. Beck Matutk, Tamsin E. Lorraine, J. Craig Hanks, and Alison Leigh Brown are thanked for imagining that this article was possible.