The Hegelian concept, with its all-encompassing power, epitomizes the kind of totality-oriented thinking that Levinas, a philosopher of genuine alterity, sharply criticizes. This paper investigates this antagonism by focusing on a notion that is pivotal for both authors, the notion of subjectivity. Hegel makes transcendence into an immanent dimension of the subject whereas Levinas conceives transcendence as the subject’s relation with radical exteriority. The decisive question is whether Levinas falls back into the failures of so-called ‘philosophies of reflection’ or whether the Hegelian dialectic of being and nothing relies on an un-condition for which it does not and indeed cannot account. The paper culminates in the thesis that Hegel and Levinas reverse the order of priority of the Good and the True. While Hegel conceives of the absolute as system of truth, for Levinas the ethical ‘failure’ of totalization constitutes a necessary condition for rationality.

This paper traces the relationship between Hegel and Levinas regarding their understanding of difference in relation to truth and history. It is the aim of this paper to show that Levinas is not a thinker in opposition to Hegel, since opposition would only confirm what it seeks to oppose. Instead, I argue that Levinas interrupts Hegel’s thought in such a manner that it is opened to a supplement of ethical meaning. This ethical meaning is irreducible to truth and history as Hegel understands them, yet it invokes them and makes them possible.

In Georges Bataille’s view, the Hegelian interpretation of kenotic sacrifice as passage from Spirit to the Speculative Idea effaces the necessarily representational character of sacrifice and the irreducible non-presence of death. But Hegel identifies these aspects of death in the fragments of the 1800 System. In sacrificial acts, subjectivity represents its disappearance via the sacrificed other, and hence is negated and conserved. Sacrifice thus provides the representational model of sublation pursued in the Phenomenology as a propaedeutic to Science. Bataille’s critique clarifies the fragments of the 1800 System, contextualizing Hegel’s rehabilitation of kenotic sacrifice in the Phenomenology. Bataille’s poetics parodies Hegelian kenosis via repetition of material difference, enacting an ecstatic temporality which Hegel perhaps suppresses as the condition of his system. Finally—if Bataille is correct in his assessment—the system would be subjected to a reversal, with radical implications for the philosophy of religion.

The following article will broach the issue of the relation between Hegel and Foucault based on the binomial knowledge-power. While for Hegel human knowledge comes with the development of consciousness, for Foucault the possibility of knowledge is articulated within a phenomenology of power. While for Hegel Bildung leads spirit to self-consciousness, Foucault initially considers formation to be connected to a forced correction. At first Foucault studies the problem of formation in view of the dynamics of power, as a faculty of repression; later he underlines that the exchange between the sovereign and the advisor positively influences the decisions of the latter, as well as their personal growth. Foucault points out the connection between truth and freedom, and emphasizes the fundamental role of parresia as a force to break the system of power relations.

Rather than model Hegel’s account of terrorism on the struggle for recognition and against domination, I maintain that his account is best understood according to Derrida’s notion of autoimmunity. The logic of autoimmunity models terrorism as a symbolic, suicidal act of violence that is created by and directed against the violence of hegemony. It is also continually stimulated by a messianic and nihilistic ideal. This article provides a historical account of Derrida’s elaboration of this concept through his continual dialogue with Hegel. That concept is then applied to Hegel’s account of religious and political terrorism. Ultimately, this analysis supports a reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology in which the confrontation with terrorism as autoimmunity is its lynchpin and which culminates in a moral community that is radically open to the other, to difference, and to the undecidable rather than being closed off and insulated by so-called absolute knowing.

This paper elaborates Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘war machine’ in relation to key theses in Hegel’s political philosophy, with the aim of showing how it illuminates the conditions under which politics and political institutions as Hegel understands them both emerge and are compromised. After first introducing the idea of the war machine and its appropriation by discussing it in relation to Carl Schmitt’s theory of partisan warfare, it examines both the war machine and Hegel’s theory of the State by way of a focus on Hegel’s discussions of drive (Trieb) and semblance (Schein). Regarding the first, the paper explores how both Hegel and Deleuze and Guattari conceive of social structure in terms of a structure of drives even while they differ in their understandings of the drives in relation to desire and subjectivity. Regarding the second, the paper explores how moments of semblance identified by Hegel as he develops his system of Right reveal points where the war machine can emerge from within State structures. The paper argues that the war machine concept challenges understandings of politics built on friend/enemy antagonisms and the use of external conflict to secure internal unity, the former being Schmitt’s explicit political project and the second being the place at which Hegel’s project ultimately finds itself when it fails to secure the rational structure of Ethical Life.

In the article I argue that Hegel and Deleuze/Guattari construct two distinct political paths toward immanence. Both of these paths have as their starting point Rousseau’s bourgeois. I show that both thinkers follow Rousseau in his attempt to construct political immanence and abandon the position of private man. However, in doing so they move in opposite directions. Hegel seeks to convert the bourgeois into the citizen, with the intention of reformulating the immanence of state-life presented in the The Social Contract by extending mutual recognition a distinct space in the form of civil society. In contrast Deleuze/Guattari move in the direction of becoming-animal along the lines of the Discourse on Inequality, by reformulating the relationship between life and society. At the same time, I argue that the overcoming of the problems that Hegel and Deleuze/Guattari identified in Rousseau introduces new ones and that the dangers inherent in the project of immanence cannot disappear.