The Spectre of Hegel by Louis Althusser

Author:Louis Althusser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2014-01-06T16:00:00+00:00

C. Countenancing the Contentf

It would seem that we have worked our way to the end of the critical undertaking by which the post-Hegelian mind attempted to dispel the vague malaise that Hegel’s all-embracing enterprise inspired in it. To Hegel’s claim to have revealed the absolute content of the accomplished totality, we opposed, to begin with, the arguments purporting to point up the defects of the form (A); proceeding point by point, we saw that Hegel’s supposedly questionable mediations, those of the Logos and the dialectic, had been intended by Hegel himself as internal mediations, that they did not exist outside the totality, and, as a result, that they ultimately found their way back into the absolute content. This return led us to a consideration of one of the most contestable aspects of the content, which we conceived as defective (B). Marx’s critique helped us grasp the perversity of the Hegelian state, but we saw that, far from succeeding in its attempt to extend the perversion of the content to the form, this critique was itself, down to its deepest levels, drawn back into the embrace of Hegelian necessity. Nevertheless, there was here no return analogous to that observed in connection with the first point: whereas the defective form made its way back into the content (A), the defective content failed to make its way back into the good form (B). Our analysis has thus enabled us to single out an apparently irreducible entity, which will henceforth present itself to us as a residual content. Here, then, is the point we need to focus on in order to cull the reasons for this malaise from Hegel himself, and finally dispel it.

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