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Table of Contents

• ↓ Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 7): Hegel via Heidegger
• ↓ Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 6): Logic and Existence, Nature and Subject
• ↓ Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 5): Alienation and Dictatorship
• ↓ Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 4): Hyppolite’s Sins, Reconsidered
• ↓ Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 3): Althusser attacks Hyppolite
• ↓ Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 2): Hegel under Erasure
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"I’ve been working out a reading of the Hegel-Marx relation via Hyppolite in the early 1950s.  In previous installments (one, two, three, four, five, six), I’ve tried to develop a lot of the background for why the appearance of Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence in 1953 was so important in that context.  Last time, I made some general remarks on the book and started on what I take to be some interpretive guideposts for the it.  I argued that: (1) Hyppolite wants to decenter the Phenomenology in Hegel studies. Today, I’ll add (2) The Absolute is not to be understood as a substance and (3) Hyppolite makes heavy use of a Heideggerian middle voice in his exegesis."

"2. Being is not a substance. Second, the absolute subject of all of this is “being.”  As with Heidegger, what “being” means is somewhat unclear, but the essential move of L&E is here, shifting the subject of the dialectic unambiguously to being and away from “man.” Hyppolite does not want us treating being as a traditional metaphysical subject, however.  For example, he insists that one not treat being as a “substrate:”"

"“Absolute being reflects itself and thinks itself. Representation, which is characteristic of empirical consciousness as such, is replaced by the concept. There is no longer any substrate [C’est l’être absolu qui se réfléchit et qui se pense. La représentation, qui est caractéristique d’une conscience empirique comme telle, fait place au concept. Il n’y a plus de substrat]” (L&E 150)."

"Or, contrasting Hegel with religion, he emphasizes “this Logos is not a divine understanding which would exist somewhere else in another world. It is the light of Being in human reality” (178). As John Heckman notes in his introduction to the translation of Genesis and Structure, there was a significant reading of Hegel in postwar France as religious, represented immediately after the war by Henri Niel, in De la Médiation dans la philosophie de Hegel (1945) and several articles.  Hyppolite is thus partly distinguishing his reading from that. The need to do so in an anti-anthropological reading had already been signaled by Kojève, who argued in 1946 against a theistic reading of Hegel (citing Niel) that “Hegel understands and proclaims that what was called ‘God’ is, in reality, humanity, taken in the completed totality of its historical evolution” and “theology was always an unconscious anthropology” (“Hegel, Marx and Christianity,” 26).  That is, the structure of Christian thought is an abstract representation of reality, “man projected into the beyond,” but it is wrong only to the extent that it is a representation. In this sense, “the metaphysical anthropology of Hegel therefore preserves the fundamental categories of Christian theology. But can one say that the Hegelian transcendence of the spirit is anything other than the transcendence of man with respect to nature. Can one say that, for Hegel, objective-Reality is anything other than natural and human” (25)?"

Key Topics & Focus Areas for newappsblog.com:

Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 7): Hegel via Heidegger

Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 6): Logic and Existence, Nature and Subject

Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 5): Alienation and Dictatorship

Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 4): Hyppolite’s Sins, Reconsidered

Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 3): Althusser attacks Hyppolite

Foucault, Hyppolite and Marx (part 2): Hegel under Erasure