RE: AUT: Hegel, Althusser, Negri &c

["Adrian Wilding" <adrianwilding@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> one of my susbtantial points is that
> Hegel can only concieve of philosophy as he does,
> because of his idealism, because the absolute and the
> (labour of the negative) is essentially the
> development of the consciousness of freedom within the
> idea, or the concept itself so to speak.

I see what you're saying, but have to disagree with your take on Hegel,
and it would take a long discussion to sort out where each of us is
coming from. It seems to me that the Althusserian critique of Hegel (in
A's later work) and perhaps that of Negri too relies on the Marxian idea
of Hegel as an idealist of the Berkeleian sort - reality is subsumed
into thought. At the same time they assume, like Marx, that Hegel was a
thinker for whom the end of philosophy had been achieved, that his
thought is a 'closed circle'.

> > I would like to see how Spinoza or Spinozism has a
> > more elaborate idea
> > of contradiction than Hegel !
>
> Simply because the contradiction in Hegel is only the
> contradiciton within thoughts development within
> itself (hence identity and non-identity), whereas the
> argument of Althusser was that material reality is a
> complex of different levels of contradiction that are
> not reducible to a singular narrative of emergence.
> This is basic stuff really.

Ditto.

> You have a problem with sponteaneity, maybe you could
> have inferred from my comments that I dont!

A better word for spontaneism here might be voluntarism. I would repeat
that it is a danger courted by thinking that the subject 'constitutes'
the world, without in turn being determined by it.

> > > But the correct reply to this is to percieve that
> > it
> > > is only when thought its identical with the
> > notion,
> > > with the absolute - in short simple contradiction,
> > > that such a systematic unity could be possible in
> > > Hegel in the first place.
> >
> > Read Adorno's Negative Dialectic which concedes this
> > point but produces
> > a better alternative.
> > Even Adorno is unfair to Hegel here; object and
> > concept are for the
> > latter always in a relation of identity _and_
> > non-identity.
>
> in a closed process!

Again a caricature, and no Hegelian today defends the teleological
reading you're suggesting. Likewise the negative dialectic in Adorno has
no teleology. Why don't sensitive readers of Marx extend the same
careful readings to other thinkers?

> A nice a-historical point in conclusion! I always
> thought the problem with this C17th thinker was the
> lack of class politics! Blimey!

Were there no classes in the 17th century?

> The time of power is therefore made up of eternity,
> inasmuch as constiuitive action resides in presence.
> The eternity which is presupposed here is shown as the
> result, the horizon of the affirmation of action. Time
> is the plenitutde of love. TO Heideggerian nothingness
> correpsonds Spinozist plenitude  or rather the
> paradox of eternity, of the plenitude of the present
> world, the splendor of singularity. The concept of
> modernity is burned by love.





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