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How Hegel appeared: postwar Marxism 1:30 H as in Hegel, and H as in heritage. So my question would be, how is it that Hegel disappeared from the radar screens? A small preliminary correction: I'm not a great specialist, I'm not a specialist at all, by which I mean I've had a companionship with Rousseau going back who knows how many years, even to my early adolescence, but that's not the point—I'm not a specialist in the academic sense. I salute, I say this with no irony, those who work their whole lives solely on Rousseau's work and know the frequency of the letters in his correspondence, I mean, no, but I respect that, it's useful, and besides, when we work, we're quite happy to be able to rely on the certainties amassed by specialists in the proper sense, there you go. So he's one of my absolutely essential references, let's say, or something like that. So, why has he disappeared from the radar screens? Ah, what a good question!
2:42 As for the question, I'll answer with another question—a good philosopher would first ask: how is it that he appeared on it at all? Because it took time. We don't really know. It took practically a whole historical context for his diffusion, the diffusion we've known since, right up to the fact that within the university world he's one of the authors who comes back onto the agrégation syllabus every 5 or 6 years, devoted to him—that dates from right after the war.
3:16 If I leave aside the little academic confinement, where there are always people aware of everything, including philosophers far removed from it, it took 50 million deaths for Hegel to appear on screen. It was simply linked to Marxism. That's why there was no question of talking about him before. The fashion was exactly the opposite. The fashion was for Bergson, whom I'm not knocking, a much more subtle and complex philosopher than a certain left-wing view suggests. Didn't Marx himself say at some point that Hegel had been treated like a dead dog, and that he too had disappeared in the mid-1800s...
The 'dead dog' and Marx's break with Feuerbach 3:52 It's interesting, this "dead dog," because the phrase had already been used in Hegel's own time—it was Lessing in particular, one of the pinnacles of the Aufklärung, the German Enlightenment—there's not only nocturnal romanticism among the Germans—it was Lessing who said that Spinoza was being treated like a dead dog. Marx, who knew that period well, took up the phrase for himself. Indeed, he himself had been one of Hegel's fiercest adversaries, especially the young Marx. When he was still—and here I hope to show a certain continuity in what I'm saying, I hope this doesn't mean I'm stubborn—when he was still young, a naturalist, a Feuerbachian, an ecologist so to speak, in the less defensible sense, because there is, again, a sense that I'm the first to defend—that's when he was anti-Hegelian.
4:43 And as his thought evolved—the case of Marx is interesting for answering your question—especially from The German Ideology and the Theses on Feuerbach onward, a very short but very dense text, which sanctions the break he was living through with his own earlier phase, with what's called the very young Marx, when he broke with naturalism. What Feuerbach had done very well, which is why he had such prestige among the young Hegelians, of whom Marx was one—young Hegelians of the right, of the left, already—that's why Feuerbach had this prestige: he was the one who had freed them from religious alienation, which was the great topic of the time.
5:18 Still, Germany didn't have the same Enlightenment as France did; there was no separation of church and state—well, anyway, that only survives among us in the German-influenced region of Alsace. So he was grateful to Feuerbach for that. But in whose favor does Feuerbach recover all the riches we had alienated in religious figuration? In favor of nature, of natural man—that's Feuerbach's weakness, which glosses over the millennia of historical effort that made man what he has become, and as Marx says, it is man who makes man.
Nature, supernature and praxis: man makes man 5:53 Let me take this opportunity to say—this perhaps sums up, if I ever had to summarize my thinking as much as possible in the fewest words, in pedagogical terms, because we're necessarily abstract and reductive in such cases—I would say that in all philosophical explanations one can give on any subject whatsoever, there are always three positions that appear, among which I'm not taking sides for now. There's the naturalist position, which explains everything from nature—for instance the appeal to heredity, I'm speaking here of heritage, natural heredity, the cognitive sciences illustrate this well currently—when Sarkozy, for me this is the most terrible sentence of his term, when Sarkozy says of his left-wing opponents, below, similarly—I'm not trying to play the petty politician here—when he said, well, delinquent teenagers, we should check whether it isn't somewhat in their genes, eh, it's not clear, we need to look into that closely. There, we're right in the middle of a naturalist explanation of the world.
6:50 This is also the case with Lordon in his neo-Spinozism, in a quite different way. So, the naturalist explanation. Second, the antithesis, the supernaturalist explanation: it's through God or through a transcendent principle that what happens in reality is explained. And finally, I set them back to back, as a Hegelian would—the naturalist thesis and the supernaturalist, religious antithesis, I set them back to back: it's not nature that makes man, it's not God that makes man, it's man who makes man. That's what Marx answers, in Hegel's wake, meaning it takes a great deal of time to become man, and as Hegel admirably says in the preface to the Phenomenology—and he was speaking well before the debates about abortion—if the embryo is indeed man in itself, it is not yet so for itself; for itself it exists as cultivated reason, which has made itself what it has become.
7:41 There you go—learning, etc., which played such an important role in the hominization of the human embryo. So, how is it that Hegel disappeared from the radar screen? At the outset, his fate was tied to the aura of Marxism. It took 50 million deaths before people began talking about Marx at French universities, where he had been superbly ignored. And so it was through this return to the Marxist conception of history that reflection on Hegel developed.
8:15 And before the war, there had been, thanks to another almost opposite misunderstanding, certain German nationalists who played up a return to Hegel, claiming he had said that it was the Germanic races that were best placed to take over, without understanding that in Hegel, "Germanic," "romantic," "Christian," and "modern" are four equivalent terms, and that the Andalusians are the very Germans they're talking about, since "Andalusia" comes from the Vandals, a Germanic tribe.
8:45 And as I often tell my North African friends, I point out to them that the Germans were in the Maghreb before the Arabs were. That makes them jump a bit at first, then they laugh and say, "yes, I see what you mean." That is, the Visigoths and the Vandals. So, on the basis of two misunderstandings, the left-wing Hegel began to spread—the one Marx discovers, so, to pick up my thread again, from The German Ideology, where he says what everyone had failed to grasp was what idealism had understood: the Tätigkeit. There's a tribute from Marx to idealism—not precisely naturalist idealism, but exactly this idealism of the construction of reality, which Marx would call praxis, and which Clouscard would rush into through that opening.
9:33 Praxis sets nature and supernature back to back; it is materialist precisely to insist on praxis. Besides, anthropologists, whether Marxist or not, are Marxists without knowing it, a bit like Monsieur Jourdain, when they make the great divisions of prehistory. Chipped stone—well, that's just to have some fun, sort of. Polished stone, bronze, iron. I note that this is what Marx calls the development of the productive forces, which punctuates the great periods of transformation in anthropology, quite simply. So, first reason: the fate of Hegel, Hegelianism, and Marx—when the anti-Marxist counter-revolution of the 60s came, Hegel was indeed the dead dog.
Right-wing and left-wing anti-Hegelianism, Lenin as reader of Hegel 10:12 And above all, he had been so up until then on the right, which is quite normal. I remember, I stumbled on this by chance—I was looking for France Musique back when you still had to search for stations on a dial. And I was looking for France Musique, and I happened to land on France Culture. I hear Hegel—no wait, it was someone who had written the Chant des Partisans, who was giving a eulogy for the recipient and alluding to his predecessor, Georges Duhamel.
10:49 I'll go quickly. He said, for Georges Duhamel, thought did not grind to a halt the way it does nowadays, and to our misfortune, with Hegel. Because Hegel plus Heidegger gives Nazism, Hegel plus Marx gives communism, and Hegel plus Sartre gives existentialism. I'm quoting him word for word. That is, three philosophers of debasement, of abjection, etc. This is to show where anti-Hegelianism stood in right-wing circles. What's new from '68 onward is that there's a left-wing anti-Hegelianism that finishes chasing Hegel off the screen, to use your metaphor.
11:22 Because here, the main adversaries of Hegel are named Foucault, Deleuze, and Althusser. And I want to stress Althusser in particular here, since he's really the best placed, as a so-called Marxist philosopher, on the subject. Althusser—I'm summarizing Althusser, and I don't believe I'm betraying him at all, quite the opposite—when he says that all the Marxists before him got it wrong because they had a Hegelian reading of Marx. If we want to understand Marx, we have to decouple, cut the cord tying them to this idealist, mystified thought, etc. If I take now—sorry—Althusser says there's only one who didn't fall into the trap: Lenin.
11:57 There you go, I'm not talking behind his back, I'm quoting him. If I now take Lenin, working on philosophy while stuck in Switzerland, exiled, in hiding, and finally having a bit of time to make the theoretical detour without which, as he would say later, without revolutionary theory there is no revolutionary practice—otherwise there are only revolts drowned in blood, not revolutions—if there's no theoretical detour, Lenin, like some autodidact schoolboy, tackles the most difficult thing there is: Hegel's Science of Logic.
12:33 And we have this text. What is this text? A reading of Hegel by Lenin. A reading of a reading. It's extraordinary. You can see the marginal annotations, sometimes in German, sometimes in French, most often in Russian. Sometimes it just goes bang-bang, literally written "bang-bang" in the margin. Or else "excellent," "nonsense," you can sense the donkey's ear of the idealist poking through. There are all sorts of comments like that. And as it progresses, the admiration for Hegel follows the same evolution as old Marx's did. And we arrive, I don't want to stay in generalities, I'll be very precise, we arrive at a certain point when he reaches the idea of the good, the closing of the Science of Logic, admittedly very difficult—he boxes it in and writes, this passage on the idea of the good is thoroughly remarkable.
13:18 One might think this is where we're furthest from Marx. The idea of the good as the final explanation—well, the idea as Hegel understands it, we can trust him—is thoroughly remarkable. Colon. This passage is the most idealist in Hegel and at the same time the most materialist. It's contradictory, but it's a fact. What a reader! First thing. Second little boxed note, just two lines later: all the readers of Hegel—I think again of Althusser—before him got it wrong, he doesn't quite put it that way, because they had a reading—because they didn't understand Hegel.
13:48 So it's the same statement as Althusser's, but reversed. For Althusser, it's because Marx and Hegel were too closely tied together that people got it wrong, and all the misadventures of actually existing communism supposedly stem from that. Quite the scam, when you think about it. Whereas for Lenin it's the opposite. Who is it that decides, after Lenin, within actually existing communism, the one in power, if there was anything communist at all about that thing in power after Lenin? It's Stalin. Now Stalin takes Althusser's side, so to speak, if I may put things backwards chronologically.
14:20 Stalin, in the dispute, would intervene against the notion of negation—negation being the very key, I won't go into detail, of Hegelian dialectics, its specific contribution—and would say that this is idealist daydreaming. It's no accident that Althusser was among the neo-Stalinists, or the pro-Chinese, whichever term you prefer, among those who complained about abandoning the dictatorship of the proletariat—there's a certain coherence to all this. So the stakes, I'm very glad you asked this question—the relationship between Hegel's presence or absence in the media, in philosophical debate, in exams, is always tied to the Hegel-Marx relationship, and I observe empirically that when this relationship is joined together, it doesn't coincide with a period of advance for the working class, or for the popular classes in general.
15:08 When there is disjunction, as has been the case since the 1970s, there is, on the contrary, a collapse of the popular classes in the debate.
