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Title: Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative by Jean-Luc Nancy, Jason Smith, Steven Miller ISBN: 0-8166-3221-9 Publisher: Univ of Minnesota Pr (Txt) Pub. Date: May, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: restlessness indeed
Comment: It is often said contemporary French philosophy mistakes obscurity for profundity. There is more than a kernel of truth to that statement when applied to Jean-Luc Nancy's writing on Hegel. As far writing goes, Nancy's musings on Hegel are not altogether displeasing when taken as poetry but, philosophically, Nancy has not given us much. This is a shame because Nancy's work on Lacan, _The Title of the Letter_, (with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe) is a rather ingenious interpretation. This should not surprise us, however, considering the body of Nancy's work, taken as a whole, is not very philosophical but rather really an exercise in aesthetics. (Perhaps this is why American literature departments rave about various French posties while most actual philosophers view French "play" much like Bismark viewed Napolean III's statesmanship: erratic, ill-conceived, and ultimately without the substance necessary to sustain itself.)
Hegel of course was (and still is) considered quite obscure by many, but taken to be philosophically formidable and rigorous. The French philosopher that initiated contemporary interest of Hegel in France, Kojeve, managed to put together a few positive concepts on Hegel's philosophy of negativity. Nancy does not. He is content to remain, despite his own best deconstructive efforts, in the world of Nietzsche's last man--endlessly searching in vain for an answer to the demise of the Enlightenment and taking the search itself to now be the best option available. Such nihilistic gamesmanship is appealing to disaffected lefties because they, like Nancy, will not move beyond the liberal naivetes no longer tenable in a post-Nietzschean world. They wish to promote a Kantian style ethical practice by invoking an unstated catergorical imperative of unconditional equality and toleration. The fact that there is no ground or reason for their political project is taken to be somehow supportive of "radical" equality; their hope being that by supporting epistemic skepticism they can institute a paralysis of the bildung that make the hierarchies of social systems possible. Of course what they have actually done is given themselves a way to advance an extreme version of the Enlightenment project of political emancipation while rhetorically denying the other positive claims of the Enlightenment. Hegel himself did his best to put a good face on the aporias exposed by Kant's reaction to Hume's skepticism but was not, in the end, successful. Herein lies the problem for Nancy and his ilk. They would be better served to strike a more truly Hegelian pose rather than languish in the death throws of a long since faded Enlightenment. Such political tactics are philosophically transparent. If you are looking for an actual philosophic treatment and explanation of Hegel's thought I would suggest Stanley Rosen's book on Hegel.
Rating: 5
Summary: The greatest living philosopher
Comment: After the death of both Deleuze and Levinas in 1995, the mantle of "greatest living philosopher" presumably went to Jacques Derrida for a while. But Derrida has always refused to be a philosopher other than in the sense of not being a philosopher (which is also being a philosopher). So his cohort and quasi-follower Jean-Luc Nancy had to take the real philosophy from Derrida back to the question underlying all post-modern thought, namely how to deal with the empty space left behind by Heidegger's deconstruction of the tradition. With this little book, Nancy himself has become "the greatest living philosopher" - that is to say he has done to Hegel what Heidegger did to Nietzsche in the 1930s and 1940s: presented him as the key thinker of the break of modernity, and, unnoticeably perhaps, stepped beyond him. This book is indeed a marvel - one gets slightly dizzy reading it. Its intensity is at times (no: always) well-nigh unbearable. Nancy, like Heidegger with Nietzsche, takes a drill to the concepts of Hegel and allows them to shine in ways hitherto unthought(see the editorial review above, no need to repeat the details). In the end, this is the overturning of the boring old French Hegel of Kojeve and Hyppolite and the most exciting discovery in philosophical reading of another in sixty some years. I had always thought of Hegel as the great synthesizer. But Nancy's Hegel "returns" Hegel to pre-Socratic instability and shaky difference, where the restless thought-in-process constitutes the sense of the world, and philosophy is as alive as it ever was. A friend of mine says that Nancy reminds him of the color of the LED on alarm clocks: well, he's right, 'cause Jean-Luc Nancy is very much a phenomenon of a new morning. The owl is disoriented but it is all a marvel. Yes, I guess that is what you could say.
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Title: Ethics, Institutions, and the Right to Philosophy by Jacques Derrida, Peter Pericles Trifonas ISBN: 0742509036 Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield (Non NBN) Pub. Date: 15 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Meridian (Stanford, Calif.).) by Giorgio Agamben, Daniel Heller-Roazen ISBN: 0804732183 Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr Pub. Date: June, 1998 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: A Finite Thinking (Cultural Memory in the Present) by Jean-Luc Nancy, Simon Sparks ISBN: 0804739013 Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Being Singular Plural by Jean-Luc Nancy, Robert Richardson, Anne O'Bryne ISBN: 0804739757 Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr Pub. Date: November, 2000 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: The Coming Community (Theory Out of Bounds, Vol 1) by Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt ISBN: 0816622353 Publisher: Univ of Minnesota Pr (Txt) Pub. Date: March, 1993 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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