Hardly any other of Hegel's works has attracted so much attention as the “Self-Consciousness” chapter in the Phenomenology. As difficult and inaccessible as the book may be on the whole, this chapter, in which consciousness exits “the nightlike void of the supersensible beyond, and steps out into the spiritual daylight of the present” (109, ¶177) finally seems to give our understanding something to hold on to. All of a sudden, Hegel's account of the mind's self-experience takes on more striking colors, the lonely self-consciousness unsuspectingly meets with other subjects, and what was previously a merely cognitive happening is transformed into a social drama consisting of a “struggle for life and death.” In short, this chapter brings together all the elements capable of supplying post-idealistic philosophy's hunger for reality with material for concretion and elaboration. Hegel's first students took the opportunity offered by this chapter in order to take his speculative philosophy out of the ethereal sphere of ideas and notions and pull it back down to the earth of social reality. And ever since, authors ranging from Lukács and Brecht to Kojève have unceasingly sought to uncover in the succession of desire, recognition, and struggle the outlines of a historically situatable, political course of events.

However, sharpening Hegel's considerations into concrete and tangible concepts has always meant running the risk of losing sight of this chapter's argumentative core in the face of all this conflictual interaction.