Hegel Infinite & the INSURRECTIONS: CRITICAL STUDIES IN RELIGION, POLITICS, AND CULTURE INSURRECTIONS: CRITICAL STUDIES IN RELIGION, POLITICS, AND CULTURE Slavoj Žižek, Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, Jeffrey W. Robbins, editors The intersection of religion, politics, and culture is one of the most discussed areas in theory today. It also has the deepest and most wide- ranging impact on the world. Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture will bring the tools of philosophy and critical theory to the political implications of the religious turn. The series will address a range of religious traditions and political viewpoints in the United States, Europe, and other parts of the world. Without advocating any specific religious or theological stance, the series aims nonetheless to be faithful to the radical emancipatory potential of religion. After the Death of God, John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, edited by Jeffrey W. Robbins The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures, Ananda Abeysekara Nietzsche and Levinas: “After the Death of a Certain God,” edited by Jill Stauffer and Bettina Bergo Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe, Mary-Jane Rubenstein Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation, Arvind Mandair Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction, Catherine Malabou Anatheism: Returning to God After God, Richard Kearney Rage and Time, Peter Sloterdijk Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism, Clayton Crockett Radical Democracy and Political Theology, Jeffrey W. Robbins EDITED BY SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK | CLAYTON CROCKETT | CRESTON DAVIS Hegel Infinite & the RELIGION, POLITICS, AND DIALECTIC Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2011 Columbia University Press All rights reserved E-ISBN 978-0-231-51287-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hegel and the infinite : religion, politics, and dialectic / edited by Slavoj Zizek, Clayton Crockett, and Creston Davis. p. cm. --— (Insurrections) Includes index. ISBN 978-0-231-14334-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-14335-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-51287-9 (e-book) 1. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770–1831. I. Žižek, Slavoj. II. Crockett, Clayton, 1969– III. Davis, Creston. IV. Title. B2948.H31787 2011 193—dc22 2010045029 A Columbia University Press E-book. CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup- [email protected]. References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the editors nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. To KXMM (the King College Mountain Men) and James C. Livingston, and to the future readers of Hegel CONTENTS Preface: Hegel’s Century SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK Acknowledgments Introduction: Risking Hegel: A New Reading for the Twenty-first Century CLAYTON CROCKETT AND CRESTON DAVIS 1 Is Confession the Accomplishment of Recognition? Rousseau and the Unthought of Religion in the Phenomenology of Spirit CATHERINE MALABOU 2 Rereading Hegel: The Philosopher of Right ANTONIO NEGRI 3 The Perversity of the Absolute, the Perverse Core of Hegel, and the Possibility of Radical Theology JOHN D. CAPUTO 4 Hegel in America BRUNO BOSTEELS 5 Infinite Restlessness MARK C. TAYLOR 6 Between Finitude and Infinity: On Hegel’s Sublationary Infinitism WILLIAM DESMOND 7 The Way of Despair KATRIN PAHL 8 The Weakness of Nature: Hegel, Freud, Lacan, and Negativity Materialized ADRIAN JOHNSTON 9 Disrupting Reason: Art and Madness in Hegel and Van Gogh EDITH WYSCHOGROD 10 Finite Representation, Spontaneous Thought, and the Politics of an Open-Ended Consummation THOMAS A. LEWIS 11 Hegel and Shitting: The Idea’s Constipation SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK List of Contributors Index of Names PREFACE Hegel’s Century SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK The ultimate anti-Hegelian argument is the very fact of the post- Hegelian break: what even the most fanatical partisan of Hegel cannot deny is that something changed after Hegel, that a new era of thought began that can no longer be accounted for in the Hegelian terms of absolute conceptual mediation. This rupture occurs in different guises, from Schelling’s assertion of the abyss of prelogical Will (vulgarized later by Schopenhauer) and Kierkegaard’s insistence on the uniqueness of faith and subjectivity, through Marx’s assertion of actual socioeconomic life process and the full autonomization of mathematicized natural sciences, up to Freud’s motif of the “death-drive” as a repetition that persists beyond all dialectical mediation. Something happened here; there is a clear break between before and after. And while one can argue that Hegel already announces this break, that he is the last of idealist metaphysicians and the first of postmetaphysical historicists, one cannot really be a Hegelian after this break. Hegelianism has lost its innocence forever. To act like a full Hegelian today is the same as to write tonal music after the Schönberg revolution. The predominate Hegelian strategy that is emerging as a reaction to this scarecrow image of Hegel as the Absolute Idealist is the “deflated” image of Hegel freed of ontological-metaphysical commitments, reduced to a general theory of discourse, of possibilities of argumentation. This approach is best exemplified by so-called Pittsburgh Hegelians (Brandom, McDowell): no wonder Habermas praises Brandom, since Habermas also avoids directly approaching the “big” ontological question (are humans really a subspecies of animals? is Darwinism true?), the question of God or Nature, of idealism or materialism. It would be easy to prove that Habermas’s neo-Kantian avoiding of ontological commitment