“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Saturday, May 12, 2012

Hegel Anxiety

I was teaching him today. I have this intuition about Hegel. His anxiety about the fissure in reality Kant detects is expressed in his constant stance of "this is already figured out"--you know he knows how it will go from the opening pages of the Phenomenology.

The idealist move--"I am thinking the gap, so there is no gap, I know the thing in itself"--seems suddenly to me to be an expression of anxiety.

What Lacan says about him, that Hegel was the most sublime of hysterics, makes some sense to me today in a new light.



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