● Hasana Sharp, & Jason E. Smith (eds.), Between Hegel and Spinoza. A volume of
Critical Essays. London etc.: Bloomsbury, 12-06-2012 [ books.google
– PDF op BookSC en scribd ] – pdf Contents
Uit de inleiding van de redacteuren citeer ik een passage waarin ze terugblikken op
Uit de inleiding van de redacteuren citeer ik een passage waarin ze terugblikken op
Pierre Macherey’s Hegel or Spinoza [1979] appears to propose a
bifurcation in the history of thought: either/or, either Hegel or Spinoza. But
this provocative title does little justice, in fact, to the complex and
overdetermined relations between these two philosophical systems, relations
that Macherey draws out. Indeed, at moments, as the title to Montag’s
contribution to this volume suggests, the “or” may just as well be an inclusive
“or”: Hegel or Spinoza; Hegel, which is to say, Spinoza. Macherey is concerned
primarily with how Hegel “misses” Spinoza, how Hegel’s seemingly attentive
examination of Spinoza’s thought is in fact a missed encounter, a nonevent that
nevertheless leaves symptomatic, legible traces in Hegel’s own thought.18
Whether it is a question of Hegel’s critique of Spinoza’s peculiar deployment
of the geometric method, the misreading of the famous formula, omnis
determinatio est negatio, or the relation between substance and attributes
in the first two books of the Ethics, Hegel is shown to consistently “say
exactly the opposite of [what Spinoza’s thought] establishes.”19 This,
we can assume, reveals less about Spinoza’s own philosophical system than it
does the conditions of Hegel’s own discourse. It is as if these inversions are
scars internal to Hegel’s thought, a blindness to what is right before his
eyes, a blind spot that is the historical and material condition for the
emergence of Hegel’s thought. More enigmatically, Macherey underlines on
several occasions that this blindness is all the more blind in those moments
when Spinoza’s thought seems to anticipate Hegel’s avant la lettre. Speaking
of Hegel’s false characterization of Spinoza’s substance as “dead” and the
relation between substance and attributes as at once mechanical and external to
one another, Macherey demonstrates that, to the contrary, substance is “in its
immanent life . . . a movement toward self, affirmation of self”—that is, a
notion of substance as an absolute process in which the attribute of thought is
a point of immanent reflection or inflexion that is perilously close to Hegel’s
own.20 It is at these moments, Macherey emphasizes, when an “essential
convergence” between these two thoughts occurs, that Hegel’s interpretation
“diverges” most dramatically from the actual formulations of Spinoza’s text. It
is this play of proximity and distance, of divergence and convergence, that
constitutes the space of the missed encounter between Hegel and Spinoza.
18 We can
oppose this mode of “missing” Spinoza to Heidegger’s almost total lack of
engagement with Spinoza’s thought and to Spinoza’s status as a dead letter in
the sending or destiny of Being.
19 Pierre Macherey,
“The Problem of the Attributes,” p. 93.
20 Pierre
Macherey, “The Problem of the Attributes,” in The New Spinoza, ed. Warren
Montag and Ted Stolze (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997),
p. 77
