Pleroma : Reading in Hegel

by Hamacher, Werner

• ISBN13: 9780804721851
• ISBN10: 0804721858
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-01-01
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

Since Hegel, philosophy cannot stop thinking its end. The violent transformations which Hegel's philosophy has uncovered and caused in the structure of philosophical terms and in the terms under which philosophy is possible is Hamacher's topic. Starting from Hegel's commentaries on biblical scripture, Hamacher traces the genealogy and unfolding of Hegel's thought into his mature worksthePhenomenology of Spirit,theEncyclopedia,thePhilosophy of Historyfocusing throughout on the limits and borders, the limitations and extremities of its conceptual and textual movements. Because the concept for Hegel is the end of the thingthe point where it peaksbecause it occurs by severance from its representational content, the trace of this splitting appears imprinted into its discursive articulation. The Hegelian text is punctuated by a series of terms and topics that operate according to the logic of the turning point: one function activating its opposite, they serve as pores between mutually exclusive experiences and establish their unity. This dialectical procedure falters, its unity dissolves, the pores turn into aporias, wherever conceptual exigencies surpass the reality they have instilled. Hamacher shows that dialectics, proceeding by way of aporias, remains unable to account for its own movement. Hegel's system must be read from the point where its rupture fails to converge with its end. Analyzing both the historical and the systematic aspects of Hegel's philosophy, addressing Kant and religious fetishism, Nietzsche and the impossible repetition of the same, Marx and the aroma of religion, Freud and the hysterical body, Hamacher's argument is directed toward what in Hegel's philosophy of spirit resists spiritualization and defeats philosophy. Aspiring to be the last philosophy, speculative idealism has toincorporateall previous systems andspiritualizeits incorporation. Its logic of ingestion must, however, reject with repulsion and nausea(Ekel)everything that resists appropriation. Emphasizing Hegel's claim to present the political theology of modern society, Hamacher shows that the mechanism of nausea meant to keep the system intact is in fact itself a mechanism foreign to its body; it averts the promised incorporation, defeats idealization, leaves the body politic disintegrated, and voids the claim of the most powerful ontology of modern society to mark the end, the completion and plenitudethepleromaof philosophy and history. What remainsthe indigestible, the unreadable, the nondiscursivedemands yet another kind of discourse and another practical gesture: toward apleromaother than Hegel's.

Author Biography

Werner Hamacher is Professor of German and the Humanities at The Johns Hopkins University and the author of, most recently, Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature between Kant and Celan (1996).

Table of Contents

speculative proposition, speculative reading

what remains

Hegel on his death-bed

the next Mass

necessary self-destruction

a hermeneutics of mortification

the stones cry out, the stones fall silent

a detour

Mendelssohn and Kant, critics of the fetish

a hermeneutics of morality

literally reading, literally eating the fetish

eristic dialectic contra Kant

the allegory of speculative Christianity

pouring, tearing

the transcendental cut

Gorgo, apotrope

the wound of castration

fetish unsublatable

systematic sublation of the fetish

death-feast of the Gaga, Eucharist

nonontological remains

a witches' kitchen

spectral double of speculation

Hegel's name

shame

a phenomenology of love

shameful being

pleroma, Evangelium, Gnosis, Wolff

an inappropriate expression

incision and the veil of language

ontology struck dumb

a love feast

symbolon and its consumption

mournful reading

laceration of the lamb

mother language and her son

recollection, inscription, memory

speculative incest

ontology: love's supplement

the father his grandson

Hegel's tree, Kant's tree

a speculative semontology

reading generates theanthropology

the name of the angel

mother a hindrance

ontology can be misconceived

the All in All, and its fall

as

Logos, and self-excommunication

Kant's moral-revolution

the law as transgression

fate

parricide and reconciliation

beauty as mimosis

self-castration

capitalism in ethics

self-consciousness, guilt-consciousness

reading as exculpation

pouring, tearing

a Christian socio-ontology

pleroma and addendum

material of the text

being, a fetish

revolution miscarried, ontology miscarried

Systemfragment 1800

philosophical unity in place of political unity

sacrifice: purposeless destruction

philosophy as sacrificial meal

tragedy of ethical life, disfigured, delayed

a history of eating

the mouse

reformation of partaking

revolution of reading

reading: a political act

the concept within the tabernacle

the dissonant note within philosophy

revolution without conclusion

the absolute and the time of reading

hic et nunc

truth inscribed

the double now

reading as equivalation

retention

movement of inscription as condition of time

concentric temporality

the language of time: alteration, iteration

this system in decay

time eats

corporeal schema

sucking, drawing, withdrawing, delaying

reading, a fissure in the absolute

metaphorology

incarnations of the idea

the active sense of hearing: animal time

logos, orality

superfluous digestion

blood and nous

nausea

retching: consolidating the schema

the disfigured mouth, the distorted analogy

a nauseous reading

legible/illegible

a mother's milk

Nietzsche reads

the leech

the eternal return

ruminating return

Hegel, a woman

process of the genus as process of disease

vomitives

dialectic of homeopathy

scene of healing, scene of reading

feminine cunning, an absolute

Bibliography of cited works by Hegel

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