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Deconstructive and/or “plastic” readings of Hegel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2015

Catherine Malabou
Catherine Malabou*
Affiliation:
Université de Nanterre Paris X
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Abstract

L'Avenir de Hegel [Hegel's Future] is the title of the book I published in 1996 and which bears the subtitle: “Plasticité, Temporalité, Dialectique” [Plasticity, Temporality, Dialectics]. I intend to examine here the kind of reading of Hegel put to work in that book. I must add that l'Avenir de Hegel, before becoming a book, was the title of my doctoral thesis undertaken under the supervision of Jacques Derrida with whom I have been working for many years now. A question emerged recently which I had never considered until now, at least not so directly, so simply: can the interpretation of Hegel that I attempt to elaborate be qualified, immediately and without reservation, as a “deconstructive reading”?

This presupposes, of course, that one can define what a deconstructive reading is. Although Derrida, as we know, refuses to consider deconstruction as a constituted theory from which one could extract axioms and formalize the method, it is nonetheless possible, as I shall attempt to do here, to describe the process of a deconstructive reading.

In writing l'Avenir de Hegel, I had present in my mind the exegetical imperative set out in Of Grammatology under the heading of a “task of reading”: Derrida asserts, “The reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses. This relationship is not a certain quantitative distribution of shadow and light, of weakness or of force, but a signifying structure that critical reading should produce” (De la Grammatologie, p. 227; tr. Spivak, p. 158).

I will ask precisely: what does it mean to produce or open a reading, a reading which protects the text in order better to expose or endanger it?

In making “plasticity” (Plastizität) play a major role in Hegel's thought, I undertook to respond to the demands of this “task of reading”. In doing so, I nonetheless discovered, under the very title of plasticity itself, a resistance of the Hegelian text to its own deconstruction. I shall thus have to specify this resistance at the same time as I develop the program of the task of reading.

Type
Hegel Today
Information
Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain , Volume 21 , Issue 1-2: number 41/42 , 2000 , pp. 132 - 141
Copyright
Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 2000

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