In place of spirit, but as its final truth, the world knows itself to be the actuality of (and responsible for) extermination, and to be the potential to destroy itself. This name itself, "the subject," has become the name of its own passing out and away, or the name of an empty aspiration and a vain agitation in which "spirit" exhales what might still be left of its last gasp. Not only is it powerless, but it is the powerlessness of its abstract and empty equality that it opposes, as a paltry infinity, to the misfortune of the world. "Everywhere equal to itself, the abstract subject contemplates the exploitation, hunger, distress, and anguish of concrete subjects. ![]() Jason Smith and Steven Miller are doctoral candidates in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. ![]() Among his many books are The Inoperative Community (1991), and The Sense of the World (1998), both published by the University of Minnesota Press. Jean-Luc Nancy is professor of philosophy at the University of Strasbourg. In the face of the horror of history and despite the temptation of past-based solutions, this Hegel's uncompromising foothold in the real makes him our contemporary, a thinker for our time. Nancy's Hegel is the thinker who foregrounds the original, irrepressible, and joyous embrace of the inevitable will to philosophize he is the philosophical guide who negotiates between the two extremes of stupidity and madness along the path to meaning. Engaging eleven judiciously chosen points essential to Hegel's sprawling system of thought-restlessness, becoming, penetration, logic, present, manifestation, trembling, sense, desire, freedom, and "we"-Nancy develops precise arguments for their philosophical importance for us today. Under Nancy's scrutiny, no facet of Hegel's work remains untouched or unrevised: problems of aesthetics, affect, and history, as well as the implications of freedom, politics, and being-in-common. Here Hegel appears not as the quintessential dispassionate synthesizer and totalizer, but as the inaugural thinker of the contemporary world-one whose thought is inseparable from anxiety and desire, as well as the concrete, the inconclusive, the singular. One of the most original interpreters of Hegel, Jean-Luc Nancy offers a portrait as startlingly unconventional as it is persuasive, and at the same time demonstrates its relevance to a very contemporary understanding of the political. ![]() At once an introduction to Hegel and a radically new vision of his thought, this remarkable work penetrates the entirety of the Hegelian field with brevity and precision, while compromising neither rigor nor depth.
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