 • Buy this item from our featured Merchant - Featured Price: $22.50
 |
Product Reviews:
Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative |
Rating: 5 (out of 5)
Summary: An intro to Hegel for the 21st century
Comments: Kojeve's "Introduction to the Reading of Hegel" is a great work of philosophical interpretation and a great aid to understanding Hegel, however the rendering of Hegel Nancy expresses here may now supersede Kojeve (writing mid-century) for grasping Hegel's relevance (if any) for us living at the dawn of the 21st century.
This volume not only illuminates the intellectual roots of continentals such as Heidegger, Derrida, and Deleuze in Hegel (rewardingly illuminating their own work in turn), however it supplies a recapture of Hegel for the left from the neo-conservative right (who argued persuasively to power for the Iraq war on the basis of right-Hegelian thinking about Western history).
Although the language can seem complex, steeped in the continental philosophical discourse as it is, the book can be a great aid to clarifying and bringing to life Hegel's speculative way of thinking (from the "we", even if a fragmented "we") for gaining social insights.
For instance, in the chapter "Becoming", Nancy gives the simplest and yet almost all satisfying explanation of a particularly controversial moment in Hegel's thought -- the 'presupposition' of the absolute. The way Nancy explains this moment (with some aid from Heidegger it seems) helps greatly to understand how a misunderstanding of this philosophical move -- the 'naive' assumption that being here, "hic et nunc", is apiece of the absolute -- can lead to much confusion and difficulties in later moments of Hegel's argument. |
Rating: 5 (out of 5)
Summary: The greatest living philosopher
Comments: After the death of both Deleuze and Levinas in 1995, the mantle of "greatest living philosopher" presumably went to Jacques Derrida for a while. however 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 -1gets 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 almost all exciting disco in philosophical reading of another in sixty some years. I had always thought of Hegel as the great synthesizer. however 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 much a phenomenon of a new morning. The owl is disoriented however it is all a marvel. Yes, I guess that is what you could say. |
