On comprehending everything: Note on the appeal of Hegel
Doesn't mysticism of this kind simply posit Being in totality in order to effectuate a grasp of it as such and through and as a knowledge, which, thus, seems to justify everything and permit the happiness that is contentment with everything as it is? Possibility and contingency, that is, the future as well as past and present, are perhaps not so much denied as refused their ability to surprise in any consequential way by a folding of them back into the totality that can only exist as presented or presentable if the future and the Other, what is outside the knowing subject and the field of stuff he has available from this standpoint, hold no true surprises? This would be why Negri is right to say "mysticism stinks of the boss." Whether this claim, if true, means abandoning Hegel, I leave for future commentary or that of others. But I have to say that it seems to me mysticism is contemplative, and that precisely is its limitation. It also is reconciliatory and tends towards theodicy. You can't eat your closure and anticipate in openness at the same time. Hegel is a metaphysician of great power, and knowledge is power, but and partly for this reason, he is justly buried and his bicentennial will not exhume the corpse, even if it is florally adorned with new eulogies. There is no theory of history if that means of all possible events. There is no grasping of Being in contemplative knowledge because this idea misconceives time, and succeeds only in accommodating oneself to a world one would not take risks to change. Today already everything is known, in the archive of statements and images, but this knowledge does not think, does not create, and as such is not interesting. The All is an inconsistent idea. Kant's antinomies already show this; does Hegel really have an alternative? I have heard that everything is dialectical, which is one of those stupid shibboleths, something people say who are so enamored of bureaucratic judgment that they can make comments like this that are as cynically stupid as that everything is relative. I'm sure that whatever is, something can be said about it.