Hasana Sharp, & Jason E. Smith (eds.), Between Hegel and Spinoza [Hegels #Spinoza 7]

In een volgend blog breng ik nog een hele bibliografie met hoofdstukken en artikelen over hoe Hegel met Spinoza omging. In dit blog geef ik - net als in de vorige blogs - aandacht aan een bijzonder boek, dat ik er graag even uitlicht.

Het boek is ontstaan n.a.v. een Symposium dat in Montreal werd gehouden op 9-10 april 2010: “Hegel After Spinoza.” [Cf., cf. & cf.].

● 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

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 

 

Hier de hoofdstukken, waarvan er diverse op academia.edu zijn geplaatst. In het bijzonder beveel ik het eerste hoofdstuk aan: dat van Vittorio Morfino.

Part 1 The Individual and Transindividuality between Ontology and Politics

1● Vittorio Morfino, The misunderstanding of the mode. Spinoza in Hegel's Science of Logic (1812-1816). [Chapter 1 – academia.edu]

2● Jason Read, "Desire is Man's Very Essence": Spinoza and Hegel as Philosophers of Transindividuality [Chapter 2 – academia.edu]

3● Andre Santos Campos, The Problem of the Beginning in Political Philosophy: Spinoza After Hegel [Chapter 3, pp. 61-79.

Part 2 Hegel's Spinoza

4● Warren Montag, Hegel, sive Spinoza: Hegel as his own True Other

5● Vance Maxwell, Hegel's Treatment of Spinoza: Its Scope and Its Limits

6● John McCumber, Hegel's Reconciliation with Spinoza

Part 3 The Psychic Life of Negation

7● Christopher Lauer, Affirmative Pathology: Spinoza and Hegel on Illness and Self-Repair [Chapter 7; academia.edu]

8● Gordon Hull, Of Suicide and Falling Stones: Finitude, Contingency, and Corporeal Vulnerability in (Judith Butler's) Spinoza [Chapter 8; PDF hier te downloaden]

9● Caroline Williams, Thinking the Space of the Subject between Hegel and Spinoza  [Chapter 9; cf. academia.edu]

Part 4 Judaism beyond Hegel and Spinoza

10● Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, The Paradox of a Perfect Democracy: From Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise to Marx's Critique of Ideology [Chapter 10]

11● Jeffrey A. Bernstein, Spinoza, Hegel, and Adorno on Judaism and History [Chapter 11 – cf. acaemia.edu]

* * *  

Hier is een mooie plaats om te wijzen op een kritisch artikel over Hasana Sharp, niet over dit boek, maar over twee eerdere publicaties van haar - relevant voor de discussie over Spinoza vs. Hegel [& the opposition between Hegelian negation and Spinozist affirmation]:

Matthias Fritsch, "Affirmation and Negativity in Spinoza: A Response to Hasana Sharp." In: PhaenEx: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, 7(2), 2012, pp. 229-238. [PDF]