The question of Hegel today: reply to Robert Wallace

What does it mean to be more or less real, more or less expressive of one's essence, more or less authentic, appropriate, or proper? Will this lead to resolving tragic social conflicts, or to proclaiming falsely that they are resolved because they are in a theory--on whose behalf a bureaucracy of Mandarins will claim to legislate, as in some forms of Marxism as practiced? Philosophical idealism must always affirm the difference between thought and being through identity realized in thought.

I suspect most Hegelians of not having confronted deeply their critics. Sometimes they make claims for justification as inclusion, saying, our theory accounts for yours. Are there possible conditions in which that might be the case, but the theory refuted, or not established, on other grounds? The problem of Hegel has to do with totality and reconciliation, and the intractable alterity of material life. This destined Hegel's heirs to be socialist, not anarchist (or communist). It empowered a bureaucracy in the name of intellectuals, whose universality is defined on their terms, and is false because it must exclude all those whose concerns are deemed particular and not a concern for the idea or being as such, an exclusion first developed in Greek antiquity including Plato and Aristotle. The (we) intellectuals identify with the universal interest, but their form of life retains the particularity of the class of managers, and they cannot think themselves beyond this separation, since to do so can only be to do so in theory. And Hegel is the philosopher who manages to seem to manage all difference, so there is no differend, no economy of unprogrammable surplus and lack, and this realizes itself ultimately in an information economy, which includes procedures for managing all possible statements. The sticking point politically is the non-universality of theory and its inevitable idealism.

Ultimately this figures the exclusion from every system of thought of the lack, impropriety, and temporal aporias of experience as trauma, and so the over- and under-determination of the being of the material and aleatory by every territorial mapping. This is an ontological problem. The political problem of Hegelianism results from this, and concerns the differend between governance or the managerial and the political, and the openness of the latter, which is widely shared today by the ethical inquiries in the world of art.

Philosophy's task may be not to develop solutions to problems but to create new problems, to problematize the given and our ways of thinking about it. If there are readings of Hegel that are useful for such a project, they should also account for those which have manifestly failed. One can avoid posing such questions perhaps only by being 'religious' and not 'political', opting for reconciliations and closing Being by finding God in it everywhere, as in some mysticisms, instead of looking for places where God seems absent, and trying to change things there, maybe even through an open experimentation, instead of just understanding them. Understanding like the theorizing and storytelling that have been its principal forms has a tendency to justify. Philosophy's characteristic exclusion of the poetic (and poietic) is a symptom of this problem. If Hegelianism today is theodicy, no one but a dull and blind commissariat wants it.

Today there are thinkers in both the American (Pippin, Pinkard, Brandom) and European (Zizek above all) traditions who have been trying once again to place Hegel on the map of live options in philosophy. The questions of Hegel include not just those of the primacy of reason and of democracy (Brandom, Habermas) versus a desiring subjectivity (Butler, Zizek, Badiou, and the whole legacy of Kojève) that realizes itself (and so risks the totalitarian temptation, thinking liberation with totality but not liberty) as in some right Hegelianism.

The question is that of the possibility of a left Hegelianism today. On that possibility might well be staked the question of how a society with a massive state apparatus of surveillance and social control (that most people do and will want because it makes their lives easier and more productive) can either liberate us or realize our latent essence without oppressing us, without marching inevitably towards the social model represented today by China, whose ruling ideology is apolitical management by experts in a bureaucracy appointed for their disinterested professional competence.

The Chinese model indeed shows that such a mandarinate is fully possible within corporate capitalism; the old Cold War debates are obsolete because capitalism's corporate bureaucracies driven only by efficiency and those of socialism that were ostensibly more attentive to questions of justice while aiming at the same productivity through a centralized economy, are really forms of the same thing, not very different, as small-c communists have generally recognized. About the possibility that tomorrow's society will represent the models not of France more than England and America (with our ultra-liberalism, blindness to class differences, fetish of religiosity as authoritarian, and our out of control toxic multiculturalism that demands that everyone describe their own oppression and maximize the expression of their own particularity so that all will be included in the grand representational state, instead of being not excluded but abstracted from in the name of universality in the manner of the French model), but will instead be more like today's China than either modern European model (there were exactly two: England's liberalism and France's universalist republicanism aspiring to democratic socialism; the Soviet system was a version of the latter, the American one of the former). American and European philosophers in the German and European (now mainly French and Italian) tradition should worry about that.

Prescription: Re-read Hegel in the light of contemporary philosophy in the European languages after Wittgenstein and Heidegger? Do Hegelians today have a credible and useful response to Hegelianism’s many critics? Some philosophers (like Zizek) ask this question, while others (the American school generally) do not. The manifest problems are ones of political philosophy, behind which we may suspect some metaphysical or ontological questions.