In Defense of Hegel’s Madness

In Defense of Hegel’s Madness

Author(s): Slavoj Žižek

Subject(s): Philosophy, 19th Century Philosophy, Contemporary Philosophy, German Idealism

Published by: Institut za filozofiju i društvenu teoriju

Keywords: Hegel; Brandom; In-itself; action; history



Summary/Abstract: The article is a confrontation with Robert Brandom’s reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, his attempt to systematically “renormalize” Hegel, i.e., to reduce his extravagant formulations to the criteria of common sense. The article analyses a number of Brandom’s “domestications” of Hegel’s speculative concepts: self-relating, determinate negation, mediation, In-itself, action, knowledge, Spirit, reconciliation, history. On the basis of the examples from Marx, Freud, structuralism, Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, Lacan, Adorno, the text defends Hegel’s “madness”, the irreducible speculative, non-interpretable core of his philosophy. Hegel’s statements have to shock us, and this excess cannot be explained away through interpretation since the truth they deliver hinges on that.