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HEGEL AND THE REVOLUTIONS REVISITED
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 September 2014
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In the preface to his book on Hegel, Charles Taylor recognized two ways that every Hegel commentator can go wrong: “Either one can end up being terribly clear and sounding very reasonable at the cost of distorting, even bowdlerizing Hegel. Or one can remain faithful but impenetrable, so that in the end readers will turn with relief to the text in order to understand the commentary.” While it is hard to imagine ever turning to the Phenomenology with relief, Taylor's cautionary remark draws attention to the indirect relationship between the form and content of Hegel critique: either one attains formal clarity at the expense of material complexity or material complexity at the expense of clarity. The task of the critic, according to Taylor, is to find a balance between these two extremes. The various “Hegel revivals” of the past century, like that of Lukács and the Marxist humanists in the interwar years or Kojève and the existentialists in postwar France, have all struggled to find this balance. The latest Hegel revival is no exception, but both Rebecca Comay's Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution and Susan Buck-Morss's Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History remind us that insight also comes from the extremes.
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References
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46 Ibid., 48 ff. To support her claim, Buck-Morss points out that while everyone agrees that the section “Absolute Freedom and Terror” referred to the French Revolution, Hegel never actually mentioned the Revolution or any of its specific details in the text—cabbage heads and gulps of water aside (ibid., 50 n. 83). Buck-Morss draws on Terry Pinkard's biography of Hegel to argue that Hegel's precarious professional situation and concern about censorship c.1806 played an important role in deciding which explicit references he omitted from the Phenomenology (ibid., 19). Sybille Fischer, in contrast, interprets Hegel's silence in psychoanalytical terms as “a story of deep ambivalence, probably fascination, probably fear, and ultimately disavowal.” Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, 32; Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, 19 n. 36.
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52 Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, 52–3 n. 90, claims that Hegel used the German words Knecht (“servant,” “bondsman”) and Sklave (“slave”) interchangeably.
53 Hegel, Phenomenology, 117 (§193).
54 Ibid., 119 (§196).
55 Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, 74.
56 Ibid., 116–17.
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59 Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, 106.
60 Ibid., 107–8. She has a curious notion of vanguard politics, grouping together such disparate examples as Osama bin Laden, George W. Bush, V. I. Lenin, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines (143).
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63 Ibid., 114.
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65 Jacoby, Russell, The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy (New York, 1999)Google Scholar; Moyn, Samuel, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA, 2010)Google Scholar.
66 Samuel P. Huntington's “clash of civilizations” thesis is an object of particular contempt for Buck-Morss. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, 13.
67 Ibid., 149.
68 Ibid., 118.
69 Ibid., 134, original emphasis.
70 Ibid., 150.
71 Ibid., 139.
72 Ibid., 16, original emphasis.