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 Contents

Frequently Cited Works vi

1 Introduction Bart Zantvoort 1

Part I Method

2 Hegel, Resistance and Method Frank Ruda 15

3 Resistance and Repetition: Hegel and Freud
Rebecca Comay 35
4 Dialectics as Resistance: Hegel, Benjamin, Adorno
Rocío Zambrana 59

Part II Nature and Spirit

5 The Spirit of Resistance and Its Fate Howard Caygill 81

6 Subjectivity, Madness and Habit: Forms of Resistance in Hegel’s
Anthropology Kirill Chepurin 101
7 Unthinking Inertia: Resistance and Obsolescence in Hegel’s
Theory of History Bart Zantvoort 117

Part III Politics

8 Freedom and Dissent in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

Karin de Boer 137
9 Elements of an Inversive Right of Resistance in Hegel
Klaus Vieweg 157
10 Does the Rabble Resist Hegel’s Philosophy of Right?
Louis Carré 177

11 Afterword: Antinomies of Resistance Rebecca Comay 195

About the Authors 201

Index 203
 Frequently Cited Works

Frequently cited works by Hegel are referenced with the corresponding

abbreviation below, followed by the page number in the English translation
(except where no English translation is given), or the paragraph number. Works
by Hegel cited occasionally, as well as all other references, are referenced in full
in the individual chapters.

‘R’ is used to refer to the ‘remarks’ (Anmerkungen) in Hegel’s text; ‘A’ is used to
refer to the ‘additions’ (Zusätze) based on lecture notes.
EL Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline. Part I:
Science of Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse
1830. 1.Teil, Wissenschaft der Logik. Werke, vol. 8 (Frankfurt a.M.:
Suhrkamp, 1986).

EPN Philosophy of Nature. Being Part Two of the Encyclopedia of The

Philosophical Sciences (1830) (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004).
Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse
1830. 2.Teil, Naturphilosophie. Werke, vol. 9 (Frankfurt a.M.:
Suhrkamp, 1986).

EPS Philosophy of Mind. Being Part Three of the Encyclopedia of the

Philosophical Sciences (1830) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse
1830. 3.Teil, Philosophie des Geistes. Werke, vol. 10 (Frankfurt
a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1986).

PH Lectures on the Philosophy of World History [introduction only],

trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1975).
Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte. Werke, vol. 12
(Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1986).
 Frequently Cited Works vii

PR Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. A.W. Wood, trans. H.B.

Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Werke, vol. 7 (Frankfurt
a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1986).

PS Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. J. N. Findlay, trans. A.V. Miller

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
Phänomenologie des Geistes. Werke, vol. 3 (Frankfurt a.M.:
Suhrkamp, 1986).

SL The Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller (New York: Humanity

Books, 1969).
Wissenschaft der Logik I. Werke, vol. 5 (Frankfurt a.M.:
Suhrkamp, 1986).Wissenschaft der Logik II. Werke, vol. 6
(Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1986).

VPG Vorlesungen über die Philosophie des Geistes. Berlin 1827/28

(Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1994).

VRP III Vorlesungen über Rechtsphilosophie 1818–1831, vol. 3: Philosophie

des Rechts. Nach der Vorlesungsnachschrift von H.G. Hotho
1822/23, ed. Karl-Heinz Ilting (Stuttgart–Bad Cannstatt:
Frommann Holzboog, 1973–1974).

VRP IV Vorlesungen über Rechtsphilosophie 1818–1831, vol. 4: Philosophie

des Rechts. Nach der Vorlesungsnachschrift K.G. v. Griesheims
1824/25, ed. Karl-Heinz Ilting (Stuttgart–Bad Cannstatt:
Frommann Holzboog, 1973–1974).
 1

Introduction
Bart Zantvoort

The history of modern philosophy can be read as a history of resistance

to Hegel. For many major post-Hegelian philosophers, Hegel represented
philosophy at its worst: a catastrophic relapse from Kant’s critical philosophy
into metaphysical obscurity, a dangerous ideological affirmation of the historical
destiny of the modern state, a megalomaniac delusion regarding the power of
mankind, in the form of Spirit, to dominate nature, contingency and otherness.
In its unceasing drive to integrate every aspect of reality as well as thought into
a closed, coherent and all-encompassing system, Hegel’s philosophy provoked
the ire of generations of critics from all over the philosophical spectrum: from
the founders of the analytical tradition, G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russel, who
sought to save philosophy from the rot of British Idealism, to a whole range
of post-metaphysical and anti-totality critiques running from Heidegger to
Levinas, Derrida and Deleuze, with all their contemporary offshoots.
As Frank Ruda recently wrote, for his critics, Hegel was too much of everything,
falling foul of both sides of most central philosophical controversies. His absolute
idealism, which sought to sublate everything into the movement of the absolute
concept, eventually inverted into, as Marx had it, a ‘crass materialism’.1 His
philosophy espoused a naïve belief in progress, while at the same time thwarting
progress by sanctifying the status quo. He sought to forcibly squeeze all phenomena
into the corset of the dialectical movement, while undialectically imposing the
closure of his own system on dialectics. He was too much of a historicist, subjecting
everything to the necessity of historical development, yet also proclaimed the
end of history and its culmination in his own system. His philosophy was too
‘concrete’, indiscriminately drawing everything from natural phenomena to
politics, psychology and art into the realm of philosophical speculation, yet at
the same time disregarded the empirical by proclaiming it irrelevant in the face of
philosophical truth (‘Too bad for reality!’ as the apocryphal Hegel quote has it).
2 Hegel and Resistance

Yet, the kind of resistance that Hegel has generated and continues to generate –
unrelenting, multifarious, almost obsessive in nature – is also indicative of his
central place in the development of modern thought and the enduring power of
his ideas. This resistance is never a simple rejection, but a continuing need to
engage with an annoying force of opposition that refuses to go away. Foucault
famously described the difficulty of extricating oneself from Hegel as follows:

To truly escape Hegel involves an exact appreciation of the price we have to pay
to detach ourselves from him. It assumes that we are aware of the extent to which
Hegel, insidiously perhaps, is close to us; it implies a knowledge, in that which
permits us to think against Hegel, of that which remains Hegelian. We have to
determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks
directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us.2

Hegel is the itch that keeps nagging contemporary philosophy, and the various
ways of dealing with this itch have done nothing to relieve the pain. The so-called
Hegel revival of recent decades has sprouted a variety of new interpretations
seeking to adapt Hegel’s thought to this or that philosophical end, which may
give the impression that ‘Hegel’ is merely a trendy brand signifying a rather
incoherent reservoir of themes and ideas, from which would-be followers or
renewers may pick and choose at will. It is the contention of this book, however,
that both the irritating need to continue to refer to Hegel and the great variety
of interpretations is not just a result of the contentious nature of his philosophy
(or its irresolvable obscurity, which prevents us from reaching agreement) but of
the fact that he touched on the critical points that continue to animate modern
thought.
The question of Hegel and resistance can be broken up into three distinct
points. First, there is the question of resistance to Hegel: what are the limits
of Hegelian thought? The systematic aspirations of Hegel’s philosophy have
led critics to suggest various things which Hegel cannot think, which escape
or are systematically obscured by his system, which resist appropriation by
the integrating force of speculative philosophy. Examples are the object or
‘remainder’ in Adorno, difference and event in Derrida, Deleuze and others,
material conditions in Marx, or the (non-European, female, etc.) other. The
trope according to which Hegel’s system always already includes its other, so
that to posit something which Hegel ‘could not think’ is effectively to show that
you are still stuck in the system of dialectics and there is therefore no resisting
Hegel, is overly simplistic. Yet, as Foucault suggests above, we must strive for a
maximum of self-reflectivity with regard to the question of the extent to which
 Introduction 3

we are still Hegelian. The ambitious scope of Hegel’s philosophy is not a matter
of dialectical trickery but consists, firstly, in the fact that the Hegelian text is
almost always more complex than it is made out to be, certainly allowing for
more ‘difference’, contingency and so forth, than traditional interpretations
have it but also for widely diverging interpretations. And secondly, in the fact
that Hegel was also an empirical thinker, integrating a wide range of facts and
evidence from the literature, science and politics of his day, while also (in
certain – perhaps rare – moments) allowing for the fact that he might be wrong.
This means that attempts to criticize Hegel for what he did not or was unable
to think always run the risk of being challenged, not by abstract claims of ‘not
being dialectical enough’, but by actual elements of Hegel’s philosophy that they
have ignored.
This leads us to a second point: resistance by Hegel. Because of its complexity,
its scope and its systematic character, Hegel’s philosophy is notoriously resistant
to appropriation and interpretation, which is always at risk of being selective,
reductive or one-sided. It seems that we either have to try to absorb Hegel’s
thought in all its aspects and risk being unable to take a sufficiently critical stance
towards it, or take some particular element which we still find to be relevant
today at the risk of ignoring its context, both in relation to Hegel’s system and to
its wider historical and philosophical background. Is it justifiable to extract from
Hegel a pragmatics, a social theory or a coherence theory of truth? To focus on
epistemological concerns over metaphysical or social and cultural aspects? Or to
privilege a particular text or period over another?
Certainly, the question of what is living and what is dead in Hegel’s philosophy
must always be asked. Hegel’s context is not ours, and appropriate respect for
the philosophical power and enduring relevance of his ideas must never be
confused with uncritical adulation or mere scholastic explication. Reactualizing
Hegel will always involve a significant degree of reinterpretation, selectivity
and, not unimportantly, translation – a restating of Hegelian concepts in terms
which both make sense in the context of contemporary philosophy, whichever
particular field one is working in, and which make sense to contemporary
readers. Yet, keeping in mind the aforementioned point, this selectivity,
translation and process of ‘updating’ should always be accompanied by the
highest degree of reflection on the choices we make in interpreting and the
limits of our own position, as well as a continuing awareness of the complexity
of Hegel’s thought. In practical terms, this means that an ideal contemporary
reading of Hegel will always have a double aspect. The first of these corresponds
to what Robert Brandom calls a de dicto reading, which seeks to explicate what a
4 Hegel and Resistance

philosopher him- or herself believed and would ascribe to, based on contextual
and textual evidence; the second corresponds to what Brandom calls a de re
reading, which seeks to establish how an author’s views and claims correspond
to what we, as interpreters or communities of interpreters, hold to be true and
valid.3 Derrida expressed a similar distinction with his notion of vouloir-dire, of
‘meaning (to say)’, which refers to the fact that the meaning of a text, while on
the one hand tied to the intention of the author, also goes beyond this intention
and must be understood in terms of its wider implications.4 This is a distinction
which is hardly straightforward to make but must nevertheless always be kept in
mind. Reconstructing what Hegel said (or meant to say) and interpreting what
that means (now, to us) are, of course, deeply connected and should always go
hand in hand, but interpreters should always seek to have an eye to both aspects,
avoiding both a scholastic reiteration of Hegelian notions and freely picking
from Hegel’s ideas to fit them into one’s contemporary research programme,
but rather striving for clarity with regard to both the historical context and the
contemporary relevance of Hegel’s thought.
The final point and most important topic is that of resistance in Hegel.
The core operations of Hegel’s thought have always been understood and, to
an extent, misunderstood, to be identification, totalization and internalization.
The basic principles of Hegelian dialectics would be to reduce all difference to
identity, to see everything from the perspective of the monolithic, systematic
whole, and to internalize the whole of nature and history into the eternal
conceptual clarity of Spirit’s self-presence. What unites these three aspects with
the whole machinery of Hegel’s thought – with its teleological view of history,
with the process of alienation and reconciliation, with the process of Aufhebung
– is that these are all forms of overcoming resistance. In the Science of Logic, Hegel
presents his own method as follows: it is the ‘absolutely infinite force, to which
no object, presenting itself as something external, remote from and independent
of reason, could offer resistance or be of a particular nature in opposition to it,
or could not be penetrated by it’ (SL 826). Similarly, in the Phenomenology of
Spirit, ‘absolute freedom’ is hailed as the ‘undivided Substance’, which ‘ascends
the throne of the world without any power being able to resist it’.5 Nature, the
external world, other human beings at first appear as things that stand against
us and resist us, but once we learn, through our shaping and cognizing of reality
that, as Hegel puts it, consciousness ‘is all reality’ (PS 138) resistance disappears:
‘Having discovered this, self-consciousness thus knows itself to be reality in the
form of an individuality that directly expresses itself, an individuality which no
longer encounters resistance from an actual world opposed to it, and whose
 Introduction 5

aim and object are only this expressing of itself ’ (PS 217). The logical aim and
endpoint of Hegel’s philosophy thus appears to be a system that does not ignore
difference but rather contains it within itself, a harmonious machine where
everything moves in its proper place such that it generates the least amount of
friction and resistance; as Hegel writes of the absolute concept: ‘as all-present’
it is ‘neither disturbed not interrupted by any difference, but rather is itself all
differences, and also their supersession; accordingly it pulsates within itself but
does not move, it trembles internally without being restless’ (PS 100).
Even if the method and movement of Hegel’s philosophy thus appear to be
essentially characterized by the overcoming of resistance, this does not mean that
resistance is merely an illusion. For Hegel, dealing with resistance is not only the
teleological endpoint, but the very substance of philosophy and history. This is
why Spirit’s unfolding in history is not a purely conceptual exercise, but a ‘path of
despair’, a long, difficult process, characterized by hard labour, violent struggle
and suffering.6 Without resistance there would be no philosophy, no history,
since it is only in the confrontation with its other that spirit or consciousness can
become what it is. But the essential question is, therefore: is resistance in the end
overcome, and totality or identity achieved?
The answer to this question is by no means straightforward, and much of
the history of interpretations of Hegel turns on it. Globally speaking, traditional
readings of Hegel can be divided into two camps (more or less contiguous
with the left-/right-Hegelian split): both of them took Hegel’s answer to this
question to be ‘yes’, and either criticized him for it (in the case of left Hegelians),
or embraced this aspect of his philosophy (in the case of right Hegelians). In
the twentieth century, the response became more complicated. While Hegel, on
the one hand, became the symbol for everything that was wrong with Western
philosophy – foundationalist metaphysics, the exclusion of otherness and
contingency, teleology, anthropocentrism, Eurocentrism, phallogocentrism
and so on – there was, at the same time, a significant revaluation. Adorno can
be considered a most significant figure here. In his Hegel: Three Studies, he
develops a way of reading Hegel ‘against the grain’ that, in terms of its method, is
representative of many other more recent approaches.7 On the one hand, Adorno
levels many of the traditional criticisms against Hegel: Hegel’s philosophy is
politically conservative and reduces everything to the identity of thought; it is
a closed system, a ‘gigantic credit system’ where all debts are reconciled.8 On
the other hand, Adorno clearly appreciates the subtlety and rigour of Hegel’s
thought, and greatly values its social, dialectical and conceptual insights. The
key to ‘going beyond Hegel’ is, for Adorno, contained within Hegel, in notions
6 Hegel and Resistance

already present within Hegel’s thought which the philosopher himself failed to
make explicit. More is ‘expressed’ in a philosophical work than that which is
actually (explicitly) ‘thought’ in it, Adorno argues; consequently, as Hegel does
himself, we have to think starting from the subject matter, die Sache selbst:

Immanent fidelity to Hegel’s intention requires one to supplement or go beyond

the text in order to understand it. Then it is useless to ponder cryptic individual
formulations and get involved in often unresolvable controversies about what
was meant. Rather, one must uncover Hegel’s aim; the subject matter should be
reconstructed from knowledge of it. He almost always has certain issues in mind
even when his own formulations fail to capture them. What Hegel was talking
about is more important than what he meant.9

A very similar approach can be found in Derrida. Like Adorno, Derrida was
not only one of the twentieth century’s main critics of Hegel, but he was also
tremendously influenced by him. Derrida’s central notion of différance, he
claims, is ‘at a point of absolute proximity to Hegel’;10 ‘Hegel is also the thinker
of irreducible différance’.11 As for Adorno, for Derrida the central point is that
Hegel correctly diagnoses the negative, self-differentiating, unstable character
of all meaning and identity – of concepts, the subject or social formations –
but, Derrida maintains, in the end Hegel subjects everything to a monotonous,
mechanical process of sublation (Aufhebung, relève), subsuming all difference in
an ‘economy of meaning’ where every dialectical move gives rise to a proportional
countermove, where everything has its place and nothing is ever lost.12
Nevertheless, Derrida too believed that the key to going beyond Hegel – and
everything he stood for, that is, metaphysics, identity thinking, teleological
and historical determinism – is contained within Hegel’s own thought. Despite
Hegel’s pretence at system-building, Hegel’s work is not a closed, fully coherent
whole, but a complicated composition of many different arguments and strands
of thought that have been more or less effectively coordinated; thus, Hegel’s
own valid insights can be turned against the more problematic tendencies of
his thinking. ‘No more than any other’, Derrida writes, ‘the Hegelian text is not
made of a piece. While respecting its faultless coherence, one can decompose
its strata and show that it interprets itself . . . Hegel’s own interpretation can be
reinterpreted – against him’.13
Of course, it is true that this tactic of reading Hegel ‘against himself ’ is as
old as the left-Hegelian tradition, starting with Feuerbach’s emphasis on Hegel’s
historical dialectical method over its supposed theological and metaphysical
substance.14 But in readings such as Adorno’s or Derrida’s, this theme gets
 Introduction 7

a specifically postmodern twist, where Hegel ‘the author’ recedes into the
background and the autonomy and undecidability of the meaning of the
text take centre stage. This development is due primarily to the influence of
psychoanalysis. For this approach – and this is the crucial difference between
this left-Hegelian current and many contemporary Anglo-American readings
of Hegel – it is not simply a matter of sorting out the bad elements and the good
elements in Hegel, as if we were in a position to authoritatively and infallibly
judge Hegel’s thought and its bearing on reality. We have to realize that, just
as Hegel had no final say over the meaning and import of his own ideas, we
too, as reading and thinking subjects, are ourselves implicated in the movement
of thought; our interpretation is partially determined by our subjective and
historical position. Reading Hegel is therefore an open-ended process; we have
to continually return to or, as one prominent contemporary Hegelian, Slavoj
Žižek, likes to say it, ‘repeat’ Hegel.15
The reason why Hegel remains one of the most important philosophers today
is, of course, because he himself analysed the self-reflexivity of thought and the
vicissitudes of the process of gaining knowledge like no other. For Žižek, it is such
elements that make Hegel the most ‘radical’ and relevant philosopher today.16
In terms of his method, Žižek is remarkably close to Adorno and particularly
Derrida, arguing that the point of ‘repeating’ Hegel is to conceptualize the
hidden ‘rational core’ of Hegel’s thought that Hegel himself was unable to
think.17 Elaborating the Heideggerian idea of the ‘unthought’, Žižek maintains
that this hidden core (which he identifies with Lacan’s notion of the ‘drive’) is in
fact constitutive of Hegel’s philosophy, and that it necessarily remained obscure
to Hegel himself.18 In a psychoanalytic sense, this hidden ‘truth’ of Hegel’s
philosophy appears only as a moment of resistance, as a disavowed truth which
occurs in Hegel’s thought and text only as a series of symptoms: in various forms
of hesitation, delay, tarrying or negation, which resist the movement of thought
(on this topic, see Rebecca Comay’s contribution in this volume).
The topic of resistance in Hegel is thus key to twentieth-century and
contemporary continental and, broadly speaking, ‘left Hegelian’ approaches to
Hegel; and in fact, as this book seeks to show, to reading and reactualizing Hegel
in general.19 Responding to Hegel does not take the shape of a straightforward
rejection, or an adoption of one or several particular elements of his philosophy,
but rather consists of turning to those symptomatic moments of resistance
internal to Hegel’s thought, moments where this thought appears to come
into conflict with its own presuppositions, often making it appear strikingly
contemporary. These moments of resistance can be particular concepts or
8 Hegel and Resistance

topics which, as various authors have argued, represent moments of important

friction in Hegel’s conceptual edifice which either ‘deconstruct’ Hegel’s system
from the inside, or rather challenge the standard notion of Hegel as a thinker
of progress, identity or totality; moments such as madness (Žižek), laughter
(Derrida/Bataille) or the rabble (Ruda).20 Or, even more important, the notion
of resistance can become the central concept for a revaluation of the overall
structure and method of Hegel’s philosophy. Insofar as Hegel’s philosophy
has always been understood as a philosophy of movement, development and
actualization, and in particular as a philosophy which overcomes all resistance,
such an approach would show how the moments of resistance – to movement,
development, sublation, integration, identification – are themselves key not only
to understanding Hegel’s philosophy but also to the process of thinking and its
relation to reality in general.
The chapters in this volume are divided into three parts. The first part takes
up the fundamental question of resistance in relation to Hegel’s philosophical
method. In his chapter, Frank Ruda shows that Hegel’s method, while appearing
to aim at overcoming all resistance, in fact contains an internal moment
of resistance in the form of the speculative sentence. By comparing Hegel to
Foucault as a thinker of resistance to power, he shows that Hegel’s philosophy
is actually more effective in theorizing resistance than many more recent anti-
Hegelian philosophers. Rebecca Comay reads Hegel ‘backwards’ through
Freud in order to explore the intricacies of the concept of resistance. Both
Freudian psychoanalysis and Hegelian phenomenology, she argues, have been
misunderstood as offering a story of ‘demystification’ or ‘consciousness-raising’
where we get to the truth only through the overcoming of resistance. As Comay
shows, however, we can find in both Freud and Hegel a different theory where
resistance is never definitively overcome but only displaced, stalled or delayed.
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, she argues, can effectively be read as a catalogue
of resistances, showing how progress occurs only through an endless series of
detours, moments of stagnation, repetition and forgetting. In the following
chapter, Rocío Zambrana reconstructs Hegel’s speculative dialectics in the light
of Benjamin’s notion of the dialectical image and Adorno’s negative dialectics,
arguing that all three ought to be understood as forms of resistance. Hegel thus
appears as the source and inspiration for a contemporary critical theory, where
speculative dialectics serves as a method of thought that interrupts and resists
the positivity and reification characteristic of capitalist modernity.
The second part deals with forms of resistance in nature, history and
anthropology. Resistance in Hegel is operative at many levels: from the organism’s
 Introduction 9

assimilation of food to the subject’s relation to the object of labour and from
the formation of personal identity to mental illness, from religion to social
development. Howard Caygill analyses the Science of Logic, the Phenomenology
of Spirit and Hegel’s early writings on religion to show there is a spirit of resistance
at work in Hegel’s system that is not recognized in the letter of Hegel’s text. In
his chapter, Kirill Chepurin explores resistance in the relation between the body
and Geist in Hegel’s anthropology, arguing that subjectivity emerges through
resisting nature and through nature’s resistance, while at the same time aiming
at the assimilation of the natural to Geist. Bart Zantvoort analyses forms of
resistance and inertia in Hegel’s theory of social-historical development. While
Hegel presents a narrative of moral, political, social and intellectual progress, he
also maintains that consciousness, in its process of necessary self-overcoming,
tends to get stuck in what he calls ‘unthinking inertia’. In social-historical
development, too, societies do not necessarily change for the better at all, but
often get stuck in social and political inertia; institutions and laws which once
appropriately expressed the spirit of their time continue to exist long after they
have become obsolete and regressive.
The third part of this volume takes up the question of political resistance.
Is there a place, according to Hegel, for political resistance? Or are we – as the
traditional reading of Hegel has it – ineluctably forced to submit to the power of
the state, to the status quo, or to historical necessity? Three chapters provide a
balanced discussion: Karin de Boer analyses Hegel’s critique of democracy and
the limits he places on political dissent, which on her view are motivated by his
concern to restrain arbitrariness and the rule of private interests in the modern
state. De Boer argues that Hegel fails to distinguish adequately between justified
grievances about political institutions and protests motivated by particular
interests, and thus allows too little room for dissent. Nevertheless, the conflict
between the rule of private interest and rational freedom is still a determining
factor in contemporary politics, giving Hegel’s diagnosis of the modern state, if
not his remedy, enduring relevance. By contrast, Klaus Vieweg maintains that
Hegel is, in fact, a theorist of political resistance. In a series of stages of rights
of resistance, from Hegel’s treatment of the right to self-defence (Notwehr) to
the right to rebellion, he tries to show there is a continuous and consistent basis
for political resistance in the form of a ‘second coercion’, a legitimate resistance
against an usurpation of rights that is itself illegitimate. Finally, Louis Carré
takes up the much-discussed notion of ‘the rabble’ in Hegel, comparing it to the
proletariat in Marx and arguing that, while the rabble represents a phenomenon
that resists Hegel’s political philosophy ‘from the inside’, this may in fact be a
10 Hegel and Resistance

strength of Hegel’s philosophy, because unlike Marx, Hegel does not eliminate
the difference between politics and philosophy.

Notes

1 Frank Ruda, Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism

(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 101–2.
2 Michel Foucault, ‘The Discourse on Language’, in The Archaeology of Knowledge
(New York: Pantheon, 1972), 235.
3 Robert Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of
Intentionality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 94–103.
4 Jacques Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
2010).
5 PS 357. As is well known, however, Hegel is actually critical of this notion of absolute
freedom, which stands for the desire to abolish all social differences during the
French Revolution.
6 On labour, see PS 118. On the path of despair, see PS 49. On struggle and violence,
see esp. PS 51.
7 Theodor Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 138–9.
8 Ibid., 147.
9 Ibid., 131.
10 Jacques Derrida, Positions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 41.
11 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1976), 26.
12 Jacques Derrida, ‘From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without
Reserve’, in Writing and Difference (London: Routledge, 2001). On the same topic,
see also ‘The Pit and the Pyramid’, in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1982), 89; and Glas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1990), 167a.
13 Derrida, ‘From Restricted to General Economy’, 329. See also Fredric Jameson,
The Hegel Variations (London: Verso, 2010), 7.
14 Ludwig Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1986).
15 Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism
(London: Verso, 2012), 500.
16 Ibid., 20.
17 Ibid., 393, 500–1.
18 Slavoj Žižek, Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism
(London: Verso, 2014), 33–4.
 Introduction 11

19 Besides Adorno, Derrida and Žižek, see, for example, Catherine Malabou, The
Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic (London: Routledge, 2005);
Karin de Boer, On Hegel: The Sway of the Negative (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010); Fredric Jameson, The Hegel Variations; Rebecca Comay, Mourning Sickness:
Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); Frank
Ruda, Hegel’s Rabble: An Investigation into Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (New York:
Continuum, 2013); Rocío Zambrana, Hegel’s Theory of Intelligibility (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2015).
20 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Discipline between Two Freedoms: Madness and Habit in German
Idealism’, in Markus Gabriel and Slavoj Žižek, Mythology, Madness and Laughter
(London: Continuum, 2009).