The Dash—The Other Side of Absolute Knowing (Short Circuits)

by RebeccaComay (Author), Frank Ruda (Author), Rebecca Comay (Author), Frank Ruda (Author)

New
Paperback
2018
$34.94

An argument that what is usually dismissed as the mystical shell of Hegel's thought-the concept of absolute knowledge-is actually its most rational kernel. This book sets out from a counterintuitive premise: the mystical shell of Hegel's system proves to be its most rational kernel. Hegel's radicalism is located precisely at the point where his thought seems to regress most. Most current readings try to update Hegel's thought by pruning back his grandiose claims to absolute knowing. Comay and Ruda invert this deflationary gesture by inflating what seems to be most trivial: the absolute is grasped only in the minutiae of its most mundane appearances. Reading Hegel without presupposition, without eliminating anything in advance or making any decision about what is essential and what is inessential, what is living and what is dead, they explore his presentation of the absolute to the letter. The Dash is organized around a pair of seemingly innocuous details. Hegel punctuates strangely. He ends the Phenomenology of Spirit with a dash, and he begins the Science of Logic with a dash. This distinctive punctuation reveals an ambiguity at the heart of absolute knowing. The dash combines hesitation and acceleration. Its orientation is simultaneously retrospective and prospective. It both holds back and propels. It severs and connects. It demurs and insists. It interrupts and prolongs. It generates nonsequiturs and produces explanations. It leads in all directions: continuation, deviation, meaningless termination. This challenges every cliche about the Hegelian dialectic as a machine of uninterrupted teleological progress. The dialectical movement is, rather, structured by intermittency, interruption, hesitation, blockage, abruption, and random, unpredictable change-a rhythm that displays all the vicissitudes of the Freudian drive.

Synopsis

An argument that what is usually dismissed as the mystical shell of Hegel's thought-the concept of absolute knowledge-is actually its most rational kernel. This book sets out from a counterintuitive premise: the mystical shell of Hegel's system proves to be its most rational kernel. Hegel's radicalism is located precisely at the point where his thought seems to regress most. Most current readings try to update Hegel's thought by pruning back his grandiose claims to absolute knowing. Comay and Ruda invert this deflationary gesture by inflating what seems to be most trivial: the absolute is grasped only in the minutiae of its most mundane appearances. Reading Hegel without presupposition, without eliminating anything in advance or making any decision about what is essential and what is inessential, what is living and what is dead, they explore his presentation of the absolute to the letter. The Dash is organized around a pair of seemingly innocuous details. Hegel punctuates strangely. He ends the Phenomenology of Spirit with a dash, and he begins the Science of Logic with a dash. This distinctive punctuation reveals an ambiguity at the heart of absolute knowing. The dash combines hesitation and acceleration. Its orientation is simultaneously retrospective and prospective. It both holds back and propels. It severs and connects. It demurs and insists. It interrupts and prolongs. It generates nonsequiturs and produces explanations. It leads in all directions: continuation, deviation, meaningless termination. This challenges every cliche about the Hegelian dialectic as a machine of uninterrupted teleological progress. The dialectical movement is, rather, structured by intermittency, interruption, hesitation, blockage, abruption, and random, unpredictable change-a rhythm that displays all the vicissitudes of the Freudian drive.

$34.94

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 188
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 27 Apr 2018
ISBN 10: 0262535351
ISBN 13: 9780262535359

Author Bio

Rebecca Comay is Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Frank Ruda is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Dundee. Mladen Dolar taught for 20 years in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he now works as a Senior Research Fellow. He is the author of a number of books, most recently (with Slavoj Zizek) Opera's Second Death. Alenka Zupancic, a Slovenian psychoanalytic theorist and philosopher, teaches at the European Graduate School and is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and the Arts. She is the author of The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two and The Odd One In: On Comedy, both in the Short Circuits series, published by the MIT Press. Slavoj Zizek, a philosopher and cultural critic, is Senior Researcher in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, and International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London. He is the author of more than thirty books, including Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, The Parallax View, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic (with John Milbank), and Zizek's Jokes (Did you hear the one about Hegel and negation?), these five published by the MIT Press.