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thebestmark's review
challenging
slow-paced
The Phenomenology of Spirit is so colossally dense, repetitive, complex and historically significant that it gets swallowed by its own interpretations and criticisms, and is sometimes discussed as a book that it isn't. Infamously, people tend to remember Hegel's dialectics (dialectics being, for Hegel, the study of a phenomena as it is, including all of its contiguous parts and contradictory elements that combine to form it) as "Thesis + Antithesis = Synthesis," a simplified formulation of a complicated process by an entirely different philosopher. Even having read it recently, when thinking back to it, I sometimes find myself more easily recalling the secondary sources I used to help me understand the text than the text itself. The subject Hegel is trying to analyze is so very big, and the disparate puzzle pieces he uses to analyze that subject are so very small.
But this is a text that is very much worth the effort, supposing you're able to earnestly engage with it in good faith. Put very simply, Hegel is concerned with schematizing the process of human though, both in an individual sense and in a collective sense, and both at the same time - because, for Hegel, both collective and individual thought are, in fact, happening to, for, and against each other, like protons and electrons reacting to one another around the neutrons at the center of an atom. To accomplish this, he traces the entire history of philosophical thought up to the current moment of his writing, synthesizing thousands of years of intellectual analysis within the boundaries of a single lifetime of intellectual development.
Hegel's (sort of) pseudo-poetic angle on history is one of the most compelling parts of his work. Hegel thinks through the polarized relationship between ancient stoicism and skepticism as a kind of genesis of the dialectics of philosophy, as originary, polarized historical embodiments of what Immanuel Kant would refer to as 'a priori' thinking and 'a posteriori' thinking - in other words, as the embodiment of instinctual/stoical and empirical/skeptical thinking. On the one hand, the stoics, being the a priori/instinctual thinkers, were more easily able to apprehend what they called 'The Will of the World,' or as Hegel understands it, as the intangible but very real manifestations of social desires as they emanate out from individuals into a collective whole, allowing them to engage with the normative boundaries of ethics within their society. On the other hand, the stoics are are doomed to a kind of baseline reactionary thinking, a perpetually shrugging, 'it is what it is' attitude towards all, seeing as they lack the crucial ability to question fundamentals. The skeptics, meanwhile, are able to open up a much wider foundation of intellectual inquiry, because they accept nothing as it is, very much the anti-'it is what it is' thinkers. They, too, cannot singlehandedly 'progress' human thought in its entirety because their nature as raw empiricists disallows them to transcend beyond the data available to them to apprehend something as intangible (but measurable!) as 'the will of the world.'
There's a similarly great section on how moral standards are manifested within a culture that I'll never forget - Hegel correctly points out that any political leadership, whatever form the political leadership takes, can never be the sole arbiter of standard morality, because as soon as a figure in power becomes a figure in power, a multitude of people will who don't support that person in power will become polarized against that person's moral values. So, the boundaries of morality cannot, in a literal sense, be policed or even represented by government. However, individual ethics are also devalued within Hegel's system, as any individual's personal ethics that run contrary to a collective system of ethics will only ever become frustrated by his ability to steer the normative boundaries of ethical thinking on his own. There must be a collective of some kind that can represent the absolute moral positioning of its people, which cannot occur democratically - this, Hegel explains, is the genesis of religion, the unelected officiants that govern the normative boundaries of morality. Regardless of whether or not participants in religious ceremonies understand their actions as such, the engagement with a religious institution works to solidify and codify the moral standards of that religion back into society as an unspoken yet official, codified rule of law over morality.
Hegel explains that the world, as we know it, is activated, or propelled, by the process of negation. This is an overwhelmingly important concept within this book. Hegellian negation is both deceptively simple and too complicated to parse, because, by its nature, it is contradictory. In Hegel's master/slave dialectic, for example, Hegel describes the contradictory nature of the relationship between the master and the slave. A slavemaster can only be the master of a being that can understand it is a slave - that is, a person who is a person, a full-fledged human being. A slavemaster can't enslave, like, a caterpillar or whatever, because a caterpillar can't apprehend the concept of slavery and fulfill the relationship. This means that a slave, which is by definition a person who is granted rights and status that places them beneath a person, or less-than a person, must also fully be a person in order to complete the master/slave relationship. Ironically, the slavemaster needs to apprehend his slave as an equal to themselves in order to identify themselves as a slavemaster.
Of course, Hegel didn't somehow end philosophy, and as conceptually difficult as The Phenomenology of Spirit is, it can also be somewhat easily problematized by a contemporary reader. In some respects, Hegel is a conservative thinker, and flaws in his system of dialectics become evident once certain subjects are approached. When Hegel is working through the process of historical learning embodied by the stoics and skeptics, for example, there is an almost beautiful symmetry to his analytical method that boldly expresses phenomena that previously felt inexpressible. Every once in a while, though, Hegel will stumble into the kind of sociologically incurious analyses that necessitated a thinker like Karl Marx to come along. He describes the normative social role played by women - that women are largely restricted from certain activities and pigeonholed into caretakers roles - as truly legitimate, in that society's seemingly perpetual placement of women within those roles naturally expresses a truth. Hegel's analytical system is insufficient when used to examine any naturalized social behavior that is not literally or effectively natural, and while his master/slave dialectic contains the seeds of a liberatory philosophical movement, Hegel is, straightforwardly, not interested in what could be, but only in what already is, an intellectually problematic position to take considering Hegel lacks for any data or analyses by the oppressed, and only possesses data and analyses by people who had the power or capacity to oppress.
In other words, Hegel has an inability to read 'the will of the world' as something that can, in fact, be placed into collective conscious, that an effective piece of propaganda can parasitically insert itself into individual and collective ideological thought, or that an effective advertising campaign can singlehandedly shift cultural attitudes without sufficient discourse surrounding it that could negate its effects. If there is a wedge between Hegel's philosophy and the contemporary experience it is surely this point - there are precious few sources of information or discourse in the age of the internet and the age of advertising that are not captured by some authoritarian/top-down manner of communication, in which information can be output into millions of eyes and ears at a moment's notice in a society that, at least in America, is increasingly socially isolated from one another, and therefore only marginally able to meaningfully participate in the process of generating a normative discourse, in producing a tangible 'will' of the contemporary world.
But none of these flaws in Hegel's system invalidate the work, either. Whatever grievances I have with Hegel, I nevertheless believe that wrestling with what The Phenomenology of Spirit is doing is an invaluable and productive activity. This book can be a major headache in-itself, of-itself and for-itself, to use some of Hegel's terminology, but it is emphatically not a waste of time. The philosophers that followed in Hegel's footsteps developed his system of dialectics to be more applicable to the social realities of the current moment and, I think, broadly outmoded him by both extending and sharpening his system of dialectics into a finer point. All that being said, I don't think I've read a book that better demonstrates what it is philosophy and the general act of critical thinking does, as a practice, what it means to think critically, than this one.
But this is a text that is very much worth the effort, supposing you're able to earnestly engage with it in good faith. Put very simply, Hegel is concerned with schematizing the process of human though, both in an individual sense and in a collective sense, and both at the same time - because, for Hegel, both collective and individual thought are, in fact, happening to, for, and against each other, like protons and electrons reacting to one another around the neutrons at the center of an atom. To accomplish this, he traces the entire history of philosophical thought up to the current moment of his writing, synthesizing thousands of years of intellectual analysis within the boundaries of a single lifetime of intellectual development.
Hegel's (sort of) pseudo-poetic angle on history is one of the most compelling parts of his work. Hegel thinks through the polarized relationship between ancient stoicism and skepticism as a kind of genesis of the dialectics of philosophy, as originary, polarized historical embodiments of what Immanuel Kant would refer to as 'a priori' thinking and 'a posteriori' thinking - in other words, as the embodiment of instinctual/stoical and empirical/skeptical thinking. On the one hand, the stoics, being the a priori/instinctual thinkers, were more easily able to apprehend what they called 'The Will of the World,' or as Hegel understands it, as the intangible but very real manifestations of social desires as they emanate out from individuals into a collective whole, allowing them to engage with the normative boundaries of ethics within their society. On the other hand, the stoics are are doomed to a kind of baseline reactionary thinking, a perpetually shrugging, 'it is what it is' attitude towards all, seeing as they lack the crucial ability to question fundamentals. The skeptics, meanwhile, are able to open up a much wider foundation of intellectual inquiry, because they accept nothing as it is, very much the anti-'it is what it is' thinkers. They, too, cannot singlehandedly 'progress' human thought in its entirety because their nature as raw empiricists disallows them to transcend beyond the data available to them to apprehend something as intangible (but measurable!) as 'the will of the world.'
There's a similarly great section on how moral standards are manifested within a culture that I'll never forget - Hegel correctly points out that any political leadership, whatever form the political leadership takes, can never be the sole arbiter of standard morality, because as soon as a figure in power becomes a figure in power, a multitude of people will who don't support that person in power will become polarized against that person's moral values. So, the boundaries of morality cannot, in a literal sense, be policed or even represented by government. However, individual ethics are also devalued within Hegel's system, as any individual's personal ethics that run contrary to a collective system of ethics will only ever become frustrated by his ability to steer the normative boundaries of ethical thinking on his own. There must be a collective of some kind that can represent the absolute moral positioning of its people, which cannot occur democratically - this, Hegel explains, is the genesis of religion, the unelected officiants that govern the normative boundaries of morality. Regardless of whether or not participants in religious ceremonies understand their actions as such, the engagement with a religious institution works to solidify and codify the moral standards of that religion back into society as an unspoken yet official, codified rule of law over morality.
Hegel explains that the world, as we know it, is activated, or propelled, by the process of negation. This is an overwhelmingly important concept within this book. Hegellian negation is both deceptively simple and too complicated to parse, because, by its nature, it is contradictory. In Hegel's master/slave dialectic, for example, Hegel describes the contradictory nature of the relationship between the master and the slave. A slavemaster can only be the master of a being that can understand it is a slave - that is, a person who is a person, a full-fledged human being. A slavemaster can't enslave, like, a caterpillar or whatever, because a caterpillar can't apprehend the concept of slavery and fulfill the relationship. This means that a slave, which is by definition a person who is granted rights and status that places them beneath a person, or less-than a person, must also fully be a person in order to complete the master/slave relationship. Ironically, the slavemaster needs to apprehend his slave as an equal to themselves in order to identify themselves as a slavemaster.
Of course, Hegel didn't somehow end philosophy, and as conceptually difficult as The Phenomenology of Spirit is, it can also be somewhat easily problematized by a contemporary reader. In some respects, Hegel is a conservative thinker, and flaws in his system of dialectics become evident once certain subjects are approached. When Hegel is working through the process of historical learning embodied by the stoics and skeptics, for example, there is an almost beautiful symmetry to his analytical method that boldly expresses phenomena that previously felt inexpressible. Every once in a while, though, Hegel will stumble into the kind of sociologically incurious analyses that necessitated a thinker like Karl Marx to come along. He describes the normative social role played by women - that women are largely restricted from certain activities and pigeonholed into caretakers roles - as truly legitimate, in that society's seemingly perpetual placement of women within those roles naturally expresses a truth. Hegel's analytical system is insufficient when used to examine any naturalized social behavior that is not literally or effectively natural, and while his master/slave dialectic contains the seeds of a liberatory philosophical movement, Hegel is, straightforwardly, not interested in what could be, but only in what already is, an intellectually problematic position to take considering Hegel lacks for any data or analyses by the oppressed, and only possesses data and analyses by people who had the power or capacity to oppress.
In other words, Hegel has an inability to read 'the will of the world' as something that can, in fact, be placed into collective conscious, that an effective piece of propaganda can parasitically insert itself into individual and collective ideological thought, or that an effective advertising campaign can singlehandedly shift cultural attitudes without sufficient discourse surrounding it that could negate its effects. If there is a wedge between Hegel's philosophy and the contemporary experience it is surely this point - there are precious few sources of information or discourse in the age of the internet and the age of advertising that are not captured by some authoritarian/top-down manner of communication, in which information can be output into millions of eyes and ears at a moment's notice in a society that, at least in America, is increasingly socially isolated from one another, and therefore only marginally able to meaningfully participate in the process of generating a normative discourse, in producing a tangible 'will' of the contemporary world.
But none of these flaws in Hegel's system invalidate the work, either. Whatever grievances I have with Hegel, I nevertheless believe that wrestling with what The Phenomenology of Spirit is doing is an invaluable and productive activity. This book can be a major headache in-itself, of-itself and for-itself, to use some of Hegel's terminology, but it is emphatically not a waste of time. The philosophers that followed in Hegel's footsteps developed his system of dialectics to be more applicable to the social realities of the current moment and, I think, broadly outmoded him by both extending and sharpening his system of dialectics into a finer point. All that being said, I don't think I've read a book that better demonstrates what it is philosophy and the general act of critical thinking does, as a practice, what it means to think critically, than this one.
hegelhater's review
É um livro que foi feito para me esclerosar, tabom, Hegel, a gente sabe que você era um virjão cabaço não precisa ficar escondendo atrás das ''aprióricas do pensar''.
sennabk's review
Haven't read all of this, certain chapters that equate to probably 3/4 of the book.
aligrint's review
1.0
I abhor Hegel. If you don't 'get' this book, don't blame yourself - Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer didn't either. Philosophy curricula seem to ignore it, simply because Hegel is the worst of authors. Not different, worst.
casparb's review
So here we finally are. In January I kind of decided that this was the one book I wanted to have read by the end of the year. It's been an interesting experience, but the last few days of focus did me well. If I might be permitted to be smugly aphoristic - there is no initial reading of Hegel. At least so it seems to me. Like Finnegans Wake, it seems to be one of those rare texts wherein an essay could spring from any or every sentence alone.
While reading this I was reminded of Allen Wood, one of the intrepid translators of Kant. w/r/t the 'Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals', Wood claims 'the first fifty times I read the Groundwork I did not understand it at all.' Let's hope it wouldn't take that many reads for this. But as Hegel himself points out in the Preface, it is ridiculous to expect understanding from a single run-through of a philosophical text.
I really loved the Religion section here. Anywhere that Hegel comes to discuss language deserves plenty of attention. But Religion was kind of special - at one point H traces the development of consciousness through tragic heroes, from Oedipus to Hamlet. I couldn't help but wonder whether Ernest Jones hadn't been reading the Phenomenology when he came to diagnose the great Dane. Also special commendation for the brief analysis of Paradise Lost.
I took the route of skipping the preface and saving it for last. Not sure how controversial that is as an approach, but it worked quite well for me. Would recommend. I also dipped briefly into Hyppolite and Kojève for this, but didn't quite stick to either. Couldn't say I've read either as a result. I found the extraordinarily comprehensive Sadler lectures on this text to be the most helpful. Seems a lovely fellow.
"Schoppenhauer [sic!] and Hegel are very readable and exciting and have not dated. What they talk about is part of the foundation modern philosophy is built on. I am hoping Madron will make it easier to get books-"
from WSG's Letters
While reading this I was reminded of Allen Wood, one of the intrepid translators of Kant. w/r/t the 'Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals', Wood claims 'the first fifty times I read the Groundwork I did not understand it at all.' Let's hope it wouldn't take that many reads for this. But as Hegel himself points out in the Preface, it is ridiculous to expect understanding from a single run-through of a philosophical text.
I really loved the Religion section here. Anywhere that Hegel comes to discuss language deserves plenty of attention. But Religion was kind of special - at one point H traces the development of consciousness through tragic heroes, from Oedipus to Hamlet. I couldn't help but wonder whether Ernest Jones hadn't been reading the Phenomenology when he came to diagnose the great Dane. Also special commendation for the brief analysis of Paradise Lost.
I took the route of skipping the preface and saving it for last. Not sure how controversial that is as an approach, but it worked quite well for me. Would recommend. I also dipped briefly into Hyppolite and Kojève for this, but didn't quite stick to either. Couldn't say I've read either as a result. I found the extraordinarily comprehensive Sadler lectures on this text to be the most helpful. Seems a lovely fellow.
"Schoppenhauer [sic!] and Hegel are very readable and exciting and have not dated. What they talk about is part of the foundation modern philosophy is built on. I am hoping Madron will make it easier to get books-"
from WSG's Letters
ralowe's review
1.0
i have given hegel's phenomenology of the spirit one star because i don't desire to be in a struggle to the death with reality. don't look at me crazy. one-starring might come off a tad punitive, or retributive, whatever, since hegel is probably technically rather light in the enlightenment game, or some would wanna try to insist that he was controversial, i don't give a fuck, he quacks like an enlightenment philosopher, you gotta pay the piper. that text pretty much epitomizes enlightenment thought in all its glamorous oppression, dare i say it captures it's spirit, yes, i dare. what's with the commas? i'm feeling comma-happy. maybe i want this review to feel like a journey, which is what wading through this felt like, a journey, yes, afar.
at one point the p. o' s. felt like it was going this buddhist way, by which i mean to say it felt like it was all about the balance of duality, but i feel kind of ambivalent about dualism, because of the necessary violence of scission (the word diremption appears at places in the text. or did i imagine that? it's like being in the middle of a vast spinning machinery submerged in darkness, and every once in a while you imagine you recognize something that sounds recognizable, like a cardoor slamming or an electric chair buzzing or a toaster popping up, but it could just be you desperately trying to make sense of the unseen whirling movement. prior to cracking this tome i read like three different books on hegel, by butler, jameson and marcuse, and this still happens? zizek wrote a $70 hardcover 1k-page book which i have not read, something i just sort of look at while i make an expression vaguely triangulated between meh and nonplussed and a question mark, and i guess the joke for all those doe-eyed hegel enthusiasts is that it's bigger than the text that actually introduces the dialectic itself, like yeah boyeee and it seems to be something that zizek has writ about the shadow i so adamantly wish to avoid, again, looking at the title, askance. although i found parts of a zizek lecture online fairly helpful, after having to sit through his ethnic sex jokes, which he was using to illustrate hegel's dialectical consciousness through the contradictions in how ethnic groups perceive one another. by far, perhaps, the most helpful boost was from my friend reginald, who uses the lordship and bondage passage in her own work, who helped me to see that it's really just all about the poetry of the language, or something; although there is an interesting double valence in the term "moment," which i would -- while resisting a definitive etymology -- say occurs in hegel's text and black queen vernacular, although reginald would never identify as a queen, but people do say things like "i'm having a moment," which one could argue -- and i want to make it clear to you that i am *not* arguing this -- as the being-in-itself, the self taking itself as its own object, or absolute knowing. i'm grasping since i'm pretty sure hegel uses all those terms interchangeably and that's his point.)
(also i had a moment with the copula *is,* something jameson mentioned in his book, and the phrase "I = I" reminded me of trugoy saying "i am the is equals is" in ego tripping (part two) on buhloone mindstate by de la soul, and how that song contrasts to "i am i be" on the second side, and the copula substitution of "be" for "is" that happens in black english. rap offers something which can be taken for narratives on moving through the world, and these de la songs perhaps self-consciously so? conscious rap seems to literally mean self-consciousness: "i am posdnous / i be the new generation of slaves here to make papes by record exec rates / a pile of revenue i create, / but i guess i don't get a cut 'cause my rent's a month late." having written that in shamelessly vain hip hop self-pleasurement i find myself annoyed since i kinda sound like a black philosophy student in the '90s.)
returning to my opening moral objections to the alleged beautiful struggle, what i mean to say is that i don't like the idea of being born into an opposition-to-the-death with the world, and here i'm naming hegel as an architect, or maybe only a lowly interpreter, of a pessimist structuralism. i'm talking here about blackness and its relationship to struggle. maybe hegel's absolute knowing is about choice, which makes more sense to me, but i feel like i'm only being gracious in offering that reading, something about taking the agency that emerges in surrendering agency. there's a flash of derrida's idea about how institutions function on fatal contradictions, or reading just the first page (out of a hundred of reviews on this site) where people seem to suggest that derrida and hegel both are writing about the same difference for divergent purposes. w/e. driving myself crazy reading something crazily slow for my personally, embarrassingly slow reading rate. something that amounts to hegel saying "everything is everything." thanks. maybe it is just about the language, like reginald says. that's what i say when i'm reading at a cafe next to where a marxist reading group is meeting. i feel bad about my association with anything that's acquired such large-scale fervor. i object to the beauifying of struggle on these grounds. this is me again on insovereignty. i have questions about trying to claim oblivion. it reminds of this object beings lyric "if i can't obliterate then i'll personify oblivion," it makes me thinking of existentialism, the western tradition, nihilism, whiteness. but i'm unsure if that is hegel's point, the one that is from marx's appropriation of hegel's dialectic. but it's older, it's yin and yang. manicheanism, i want to say. but it's a struggle for a moment, an ultimate recuperation. but i'm like why the drama? who does the drama serve? i haven't read marx, i'm badly trying to critique marx, never having read das kapital, it's on my reading list i say, but i really want to critique marxists, or the third so-called world marxist embrace that's also a colonization of this particualr need for heirarchy. maybe it feels inevitable, heirarchies do, or maybe the only way we seem to be able to relate to one another, but i would prefer to collectively imagine more, something else, something better. someone from their reading group asks if i am with a group. i don't want to hear what they say so i decline to out myself as either anarchist or queer, since i probably don't need to out myself as black, but i do talk about blackness in relation to fanon and hegel, as that's the reason i'm reading it, or one of the reasons, but then one person from the reading group is trying to school me on toussaint, and it feels competitve or is it proseltyzing? i don't want to associate, i don't want to be associated. no heirarchies. it's unclear to me whether hegel was influenced by either toussaint or napoleon, but my guess is that it was the latter, moreso, since his country was on the verge of being invaded by him, or something, at the time of writing. i say something about how the worker is typically thought about as male, one of them, the most vocal one, insists that it's about class cross-gender. why am i so invested in the marxist reading group thinking about gender? oh, because there's one woman in the group. did i ask one of them if they've seen born in flames? but none of them have read hegel. 'cause he's a philosopher, marx was more of an organizer. is that true? i say something about engel's dad owning a factory. did it only employ women? i don't have internet access in the cafe. i want to stress that marx was a philosopher too, but i don't stress it very well, or well enough, and they make the distinction that marx definitely organized, wrote for the common man, tried to be accessible, talked about material things in the world. the one sitting between the men says philosophers are more abstract. i want to ask how thinking about the ways one deals with being in the world can possibly be abstract but i don't because my book has made me dizzy.
at one point the p. o' s. felt like it was going this buddhist way, by which i mean to say it felt like it was all about the balance of duality, but i feel kind of ambivalent about dualism, because of the necessary violence of scission (the word diremption appears at places in the text. or did i imagine that? it's like being in the middle of a vast spinning machinery submerged in darkness, and every once in a while you imagine you recognize something that sounds recognizable, like a cardoor slamming or an electric chair buzzing or a toaster popping up, but it could just be you desperately trying to make sense of the unseen whirling movement. prior to cracking this tome i read like three different books on hegel, by butler, jameson and marcuse, and this still happens? zizek wrote a $70 hardcover 1k-page book which i have not read, something i just sort of look at while i make an expression vaguely triangulated between meh and nonplussed and a question mark, and i guess the joke for all those doe-eyed hegel enthusiasts is that it's bigger than the text that actually introduces the dialectic itself, like yeah boyeee and it seems to be something that zizek has writ about the shadow i so adamantly wish to avoid, again, looking at the title, askance. although i found parts of a zizek lecture online fairly helpful, after having to sit through his ethnic sex jokes, which he was using to illustrate hegel's dialectical consciousness through the contradictions in how ethnic groups perceive one another. by far, perhaps, the most helpful boost was from my friend reginald, who uses the lordship and bondage passage in her own work, who helped me to see that it's really just all about the poetry of the language, or something; although there is an interesting double valence in the term "moment," which i would -- while resisting a definitive etymology -- say occurs in hegel's text and black queen vernacular, although reginald would never identify as a queen, but people do say things like "i'm having a moment," which one could argue -- and i want to make it clear to you that i am *not* arguing this -- as the being-in-itself, the self taking itself as its own object, or absolute knowing. i'm grasping since i'm pretty sure hegel uses all those terms interchangeably and that's his point.)
(also i had a moment with the copula *is,* something jameson mentioned in his book, and the phrase "I = I" reminded me of trugoy saying "i am the is equals is" in ego tripping (part two) on buhloone mindstate by de la soul, and how that song contrasts to "i am i be" on the second side, and the copula substitution of "be" for "is" that happens in black english. rap offers something which can be taken for narratives on moving through the world, and these de la songs perhaps self-consciously so? conscious rap seems to literally mean self-consciousness: "i am posdnous / i be the new generation of slaves here to make papes by record exec rates / a pile of revenue i create, / but i guess i don't get a cut 'cause my rent's a month late." having written that in shamelessly vain hip hop self-pleasurement i find myself annoyed since i kinda sound like a black philosophy student in the '90s.)
returning to my opening moral objections to the alleged beautiful struggle, what i mean to say is that i don't like the idea of being born into an opposition-to-the-death with the world, and here i'm naming hegel as an architect, or maybe only a lowly interpreter, of a pessimist structuralism. i'm talking here about blackness and its relationship to struggle. maybe hegel's absolute knowing is about choice, which makes more sense to me, but i feel like i'm only being gracious in offering that reading, something about taking the agency that emerges in surrendering agency. there's a flash of derrida's idea about how institutions function on fatal contradictions, or reading just the first page (out of a hundred of reviews on this site) where people seem to suggest that derrida and hegel both are writing about the same difference for divergent purposes. w/e. driving myself crazy reading something crazily slow for my personally, embarrassingly slow reading rate. something that amounts to hegel saying "everything is everything." thanks. maybe it is just about the language, like reginald says. that's what i say when i'm reading at a cafe next to where a marxist reading group is meeting. i feel bad about my association with anything that's acquired such large-scale fervor. i object to the beauifying of struggle on these grounds. this is me again on insovereignty. i have questions about trying to claim oblivion. it reminds of this object beings lyric "if i can't obliterate then i'll personify oblivion," it makes me thinking of existentialism, the western tradition, nihilism, whiteness. but i'm unsure if that is hegel's point, the one that is from marx's appropriation of hegel's dialectic. but it's older, it's yin and yang. manicheanism, i want to say. but it's a struggle for a moment, an ultimate recuperation. but i'm like why the drama? who does the drama serve? i haven't read marx, i'm badly trying to critique marx, never having read das kapital, it's on my reading list i say, but i really want to critique marxists, or the third so-called world marxist embrace that's also a colonization of this particualr need for heirarchy. maybe it feels inevitable, heirarchies do, or maybe the only way we seem to be able to relate to one another, but i would prefer to collectively imagine more, something else, something better. someone from their reading group asks if i am with a group. i don't want to hear what they say so i decline to out myself as either anarchist or queer, since i probably don't need to out myself as black, but i do talk about blackness in relation to fanon and hegel, as that's the reason i'm reading it, or one of the reasons, but then one person from the reading group is trying to school me on toussaint, and it feels competitve or is it proseltyzing? i don't want to associate, i don't want to be associated. no heirarchies. it's unclear to me whether hegel was influenced by either toussaint or napoleon, but my guess is that it was the latter, moreso, since his country was on the verge of being invaded by him, or something, at the time of writing. i say something about how the worker is typically thought about as male, one of them, the most vocal one, insists that it's about class cross-gender. why am i so invested in the marxist reading group thinking about gender? oh, because there's one woman in the group. did i ask one of them if they've seen born in flames? but none of them have read hegel. 'cause he's a philosopher, marx was more of an organizer. is that true? i say something about engel's dad owning a factory. did it only employ women? i don't have internet access in the cafe. i want to stress that marx was a philosopher too, but i don't stress it very well, or well enough, and they make the distinction that marx definitely organized, wrote for the common man, tried to be accessible, talked about material things in the world. the one sitting between the men says philosophers are more abstract. i want to ask how thinking about the ways one deals with being in the world can possibly be abstract but i don't because my book has made me dizzy.