What do you think?
Rate this book
Hegel Varyasyonları - Tinin Fenomenolojisi Üzerine
"…Üstelik ahlakçılar ya da bilimciler bile başaramazken dili ciddiye almanın anlamı nedir? Bence onların dille ilgili sorununun iki yönü vardır: Bir taraftan niyetin dilde duyu-algısından daha fazla kaydedilemeyeceğini hiçbiri anlamamış görünüyor. "Kastettikleri", "söylemek istedikleri" ya da "söylemeye niyet ettikleri" şey daima ölümcül bir tarzda söylediklerinin tersi çıkar. Dilin ya katı olguyu ya da görünüşün ötesini ifade etmesini isterler, ama dil ancak bu iki karşıtlık arasındaki diyalektik ilişkiyi aktarabilir."
Jameson'ın "negatifin emeği"ni Diyalektiğin Birleştirici Güçleri'nde en özenli şekilde sunduğunu düşünen okurları Hegel Varyasyonları hem şaşırtacak hem de onlara eleştirel bir destek sağlayacak. Hacmen küçük olsa da, Varyasyonlar'ın asla hafif sayılamayacak argümanları Jameson'ın Hegel'in zorlu soyutlamalarıyla girdiği teorik mücadelenin bir başka keyifli bölümünü okura sunuyor.
-Peter Hitchcock, CUNY-
Jameson'ın "negatifin emeği"ni Diyalektiğin Birleştirici Güçleri'nde en özenli şekilde sunduğunu düşünen okurları Hegel Varyasyonları hem şaşırtacak hem de onlara eleştirel bir destek sağlayacak. Hacmen küçük olsa da, Varyasyonlar'ın asla hafif sayılamayacak argümanları Jameson'ın Hegel'in zorlu soyutlamalarıyla girdiği teorik mücadelenin bir başka keyifli bölümünü okura sunuyor.
-Peter Hitchcock, CUNY-
152 pages, Paperback
First published July 2, 2010
21 people are currently reading
726 people want to read
About the author
Fredric Jameson
166 books680 followersFredric Jameson was an American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He was best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and The Political Unconscious (1981).
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
March 29, 2021
This is a nice brief companion piece to the Phenomenology that’s fairly readable (even if it is wrapped up in Jameson’s horrendously hyper-academic style). Nothing totally mind-blowing here, but a helpful explication to some parts of the Phenomenology along with some original insights from Jameson himself. Even though it goes through most of the Phenomenology linearly cover to cover, it’s hard to pull out a central theme and it reads like a series of essays. Given that the text can be scattered in the insights, this review will be comparably scattered and draw upon random thoughts I have on Hegel.
Jameson on the Dialectic and Antigone
Jameson spends much of the text both explicating the Phenomenology while also countering some of the Hegelian stereotypes that have arisen from it. Among the most important of these stereotypes is the vulgar view of the Hegelian dialectic as a triad of “thesis - antithesis - synthesis.” According to this triadic formula, thesis encounters an antithesis and enters into contradiction with it. Through the conflict between these contradicting theses, a new synthesis emerges that has sublated the two and preserves elements from both. This synthesis becomes the new thesis in the next iteration of the dialectic. In this view, the dialectic is in constant upward motion as contradictions are resolved and humanity constantly moves toward higher stages of development.
Even though there’s certainly some truth to this model, it dangerously oversimplifies the fact that the dialectic rarely runs so smoothly. In Hegel, we often find contradictions in which no synthesis is possible. As Jameson writes: “Positing a kind of success or progress in externalization and internalization which scarcely does justice to Hegel’s deeper appreciation of failure and contradiction turns the historical movement of the dialectic into a banal and uplifting saga of inevitable progress” (20). Jameson goes into an example of this at length in his chapter on Antigone. Jameson notes: “Antigone testifies to the existence of problems that cannot be solved, and as such utterly invalidates the myth of Hegel as a teleological thinker.” Even though I think Jameson overreaches in claiming that this is undeniable proof of a non-teleological Hegel (People are way too allergic to “teleology” these days. I blame postmodernism), the fundamental insight is correct. Hegel’s use of the example of Antigone draws upon the defining characteristic of Greek tragedy: irresolvable contradiction. The play ends with the death of Antigone and the ruin of Creon. The conflict is not resolved with harmony, but with complete annihilation.
But Jameson’s reading here is actually far more interesting. Jameson doesn’t focus on the destructive finale of Antigone, but rather the contradiction that begins the story. Hegel’s telling of Antigone is well-known as the conflict between human law (Creon) and divine law (Antigone). But Jameson looks at the transition through which these two laws emerge: the division of simple Substance (which for our purposes here can be defined as non-organized social community). It is precisely through the division of abstract simple Substance that society as such can be articulated and gain a content. Before that, it merely exists without differentiation and thus, no definable articulated content. This is why Jameson defines Hegelian negativity here as division. It is through the division of simple Substance into human law and divine law that society gains the divisions that allow it to exist qua society: “that of warrior versus priest, or of city versus clan, or even outside versus inside.” It is precisely these divisions that bring society itself into existence and give it its defined articulated structure.
Jameson expands this example of the determinate negation that divides Substance into human and divine law to the rest of the Phenomenology’s methodology:
Subjectivity must always divide; or in other words that it must always become concrete by dividing itself, which is to say that it must always give itself the thematic content of a specific opposition. We cannot, in other words, fulfill such injunctions against positivity by persisting in indeterminacy: we must give ourselves over to the determinate and make our way through such specific content and thematics until we come out the other side.(85)
Substantial content only arises through opposition and division that articulates its definition. Dividing a Substance is just a change in form, but a change in form that articulates a new content. The generation of a specific thematic and content requires a “giving over” to the determinate that brings us out of the realm of abstraction. This is why when Jameson disavows the triadic view of the dialectic (which Hegel himself never explicitly used), he argues that the characterization of the Phenomenology as consciousness/Spirit constantly dividing itself and returning to itself is a much more useful way to read the text (which Hegel is very clear about many times). “The dialectic” is a really confusing concept that I’m still wrapping my head around, but I hope that the common conception of it moves towards this version rather than the triadic model (at least in the context of the Phenomenology.
Hegel’s (or Fichte’s) Critique of the Thing-In-Itself and the Beginnings of German Idealism
Something that I’m really glad that Jameson addresses is the post-Kantian critique of the Kantian “thing-in-itself”: the object outside of consciousness that is the source of our mental representations, but can never be truly understood. The thing-in-itself is the fundamental limit to consciousness that can never be surpassed because every experience of the real world is filtered by our subjective minds. It is what we will never be able to wholly grasp because we are always trapped within our own minds.
The thing-in-itself was the easiest target for all of the German Idealist philosophers who followed Kant and most productively critiqued by Fichte. If the thing-in-itself demarcates the limits of consciousness and occupies the space beyond subjectivity, then the positing of the thing-of-itself implies that we have taken a view of what lies beyond our subjectivity. In other words, to even posit that there is a limit to consciousness is to claim that one possesses a view beyond consciousness where one can see that something outside truly exists. It means that I would have to take a bird’s eye view where I can see myself as an object and also see that there’s a thing-in-itself to the other side of it. To even say that there is a border, one is claiming that there is something beyond the border. And to claim that there is a beyond means that one is claiming that they have gone beyond their own consciousness.
This is precisely why Fichte’s starting assumption is the infinite Ego. According to Zizek’s reading (which Fichte would probably disagree with), Fichte was not some anti-realist who did not believe that there was no outside world. Instead, Fichte recognized the problems of the Kantian thing-in-itself and understood that, paradoxically, the only way to recognize the Ego’s finitude is by assuming that the Ego is infinite. If I say that my Ego is infinite, then this means that I am denying the existence of an outside world and eschewing any claims for something beyond the Ego. I am the fish who is asking “What the hell is water?” because I can’t see from a perspective outside the fish bowl. It is only from this starting point of the Ego’s assumed infinitude that any knowledge can be derived because it is also the only way to avoid the false assumption of the subject’s ability to view itself from above as an object. After this point, knowledge becomes possible through the Ego’s positing of the non-Ego, where it can contemplate itself as an object. But to attempt to treat the Ego as an object before starting at the absolute infinite Ego is absurd.
Anyways, this is a big digression and I’m not sure how much of this carries over to Hegel given that Hegel was not centered around questions of the Ego, but I’m glad that Jameson acknowledges the enormous debt Hegel had to Fichte. Aside from being the one who actually came up with the thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad, Fichte was the first great post-Kantian philosopher and his influence on Hegel is important for understanding Hegel himself.
Hegel on Ethical Life (Sittlichkeit)
Hegel’s main undertaking of Ethical Life (the German Sittlichkeit indicates the fundamental social nature of ethics and includes things like tradition and custom) is in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right so some of what I’m talking about from Jameson will probably be mixed up with that book. Jameson explains Hegel’s rejection of Kantian ethics as the imposition of the restrictive external law, the Sollen. Instead of alienated externally imposed rules, Hegelian ethics seeks immanence and activity (Tätigkeit). For Hegel, each party should see themselves within social institutions as objective manifestations of themselves. In this way, laws are not externally imposed, but rather active embodiments of all individuals’ wills. This is why the central theme of The Philosophy of Right is that the will wills the free will. Each party within society (subjective will) must acknowledge its own will within objective social institutions (objective will). They must recognize objective social institutions as their own production that carry their will. The contradiction between individual freedom and social necessity is dissolved and brought into harmony as social institutions become objective manifestations of freedom itself. (We see here another Fichtean influence on Hegel: the subject-object. I was very happy to see Jameson acknowledge this and articulate Sittlichkeit in these terms).
This is Hegel’s answer to alienated society and his vision of what a truly human society looks like. Marx’s great critique of alienated society under capitalism would be impossible without Hegel and it is no mistake that Marx’s central text on alienation, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, includes a close examination of the Phenomenology. Jameson points out that this has obviously not played out under late capitalism and that we feel more alienated from social institutions than ever before. This is another point in which we really see how brilliant Marx was at productively exposing Hegel’s deficiencies and building upon them. In the famous introduction to Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx claims that German philosophy is actually ahead of its time and that the praxis is in fact still catching up. Marx recognized the greatness of Hegel’s social vision, but, unlike Hegel, knew that the end of capitalism was the only way to actualize it.
Jameson on the Dialectic and Antigone
Jameson spends much of the text both explicating the Phenomenology while also countering some of the Hegelian stereotypes that have arisen from it. Among the most important of these stereotypes is the vulgar view of the Hegelian dialectic as a triad of “thesis - antithesis - synthesis.” According to this triadic formula, thesis encounters an antithesis and enters into contradiction with it. Through the conflict between these contradicting theses, a new synthesis emerges that has sublated the two and preserves elements from both. This synthesis becomes the new thesis in the next iteration of the dialectic. In this view, the dialectic is in constant upward motion as contradictions are resolved and humanity constantly moves toward higher stages of development.
Even though there’s certainly some truth to this model, it dangerously oversimplifies the fact that the dialectic rarely runs so smoothly. In Hegel, we often find contradictions in which no synthesis is possible. As Jameson writes: “Positing a kind of success or progress in externalization and internalization which scarcely does justice to Hegel’s deeper appreciation of failure and contradiction turns the historical movement of the dialectic into a banal and uplifting saga of inevitable progress” (20). Jameson goes into an example of this at length in his chapter on Antigone. Jameson notes: “Antigone testifies to the existence of problems that cannot be solved, and as such utterly invalidates the myth of Hegel as a teleological thinker.” Even though I think Jameson overreaches in claiming that this is undeniable proof of a non-teleological Hegel (People are way too allergic to “teleology” these days. I blame postmodernism), the fundamental insight is correct. Hegel’s use of the example of Antigone draws upon the defining characteristic of Greek tragedy: irresolvable contradiction. The play ends with the death of Antigone and the ruin of Creon. The conflict is not resolved with harmony, but with complete annihilation.
But Jameson’s reading here is actually far more interesting. Jameson doesn’t focus on the destructive finale of Antigone, but rather the contradiction that begins the story. Hegel’s telling of Antigone is well-known as the conflict between human law (Creon) and divine law (Antigone). But Jameson looks at the transition through which these two laws emerge: the division of simple Substance (which for our purposes here can be defined as non-organized social community). It is precisely through the division of abstract simple Substance that society as such can be articulated and gain a content. Before that, it merely exists without differentiation and thus, no definable articulated content. This is why Jameson defines Hegelian negativity here as division. It is through the division of simple Substance into human law and divine law that society gains the divisions that allow it to exist qua society: “that of warrior versus priest, or of city versus clan, or even outside versus inside.” It is precisely these divisions that bring society itself into existence and give it its defined articulated structure.
Jameson expands this example of the determinate negation that divides Substance into human and divine law to the rest of the Phenomenology’s methodology:
Subjectivity must always divide; or in other words that it must always become concrete by dividing itself, which is to say that it must always give itself the thematic content of a specific opposition. We cannot, in other words, fulfill such injunctions against positivity by persisting in indeterminacy: we must give ourselves over to the determinate and make our way through such specific content and thematics until we come out the other side.(85)
Substantial content only arises through opposition and division that articulates its definition. Dividing a Substance is just a change in form, but a change in form that articulates a new content. The generation of a specific thematic and content requires a “giving over” to the determinate that brings us out of the realm of abstraction. This is why when Jameson disavows the triadic view of the dialectic (which Hegel himself never explicitly used), he argues that the characterization of the Phenomenology as consciousness/Spirit constantly dividing itself and returning to itself is a much more useful way to read the text (which Hegel is very clear about many times). “The dialectic” is a really confusing concept that I’m still wrapping my head around, but I hope that the common conception of it moves towards this version rather than the triadic model (at least in the context of the Phenomenology.
Hegel’s (or Fichte’s) Critique of the Thing-In-Itself and the Beginnings of German Idealism
Something that I’m really glad that Jameson addresses is the post-Kantian critique of the Kantian “thing-in-itself”: the object outside of consciousness that is the source of our mental representations, but can never be truly understood. The thing-in-itself is the fundamental limit to consciousness that can never be surpassed because every experience of the real world is filtered by our subjective minds. It is what we will never be able to wholly grasp because we are always trapped within our own minds.
The thing-in-itself was the easiest target for all of the German Idealist philosophers who followed Kant and most productively critiqued by Fichte. If the thing-in-itself demarcates the limits of consciousness and occupies the space beyond subjectivity, then the positing of the thing-of-itself implies that we have taken a view of what lies beyond our subjectivity. In other words, to even posit that there is a limit to consciousness is to claim that one possesses a view beyond consciousness where one can see that something outside truly exists. It means that I would have to take a bird’s eye view where I can see myself as an object and also see that there’s a thing-in-itself to the other side of it. To even say that there is a border, one is claiming that there is something beyond the border. And to claim that there is a beyond means that one is claiming that they have gone beyond their own consciousness.
This is precisely why Fichte’s starting assumption is the infinite Ego. According to Zizek’s reading (which Fichte would probably disagree with), Fichte was not some anti-realist who did not believe that there was no outside world. Instead, Fichte recognized the problems of the Kantian thing-in-itself and understood that, paradoxically, the only way to recognize the Ego’s finitude is by assuming that the Ego is infinite. If I say that my Ego is infinite, then this means that I am denying the existence of an outside world and eschewing any claims for something beyond the Ego. I am the fish who is asking “What the hell is water?” because I can’t see from a perspective outside the fish bowl. It is only from this starting point of the Ego’s assumed infinitude that any knowledge can be derived because it is also the only way to avoid the false assumption of the subject’s ability to view itself from above as an object. After this point, knowledge becomes possible through the Ego’s positing of the non-Ego, where it can contemplate itself as an object. But to attempt to treat the Ego as an object before starting at the absolute infinite Ego is absurd.
Anyways, this is a big digression and I’m not sure how much of this carries over to Hegel given that Hegel was not centered around questions of the Ego, but I’m glad that Jameson acknowledges the enormous debt Hegel had to Fichte. Aside from being the one who actually came up with the thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad, Fichte was the first great post-Kantian philosopher and his influence on Hegel is important for understanding Hegel himself.
Hegel on Ethical Life (Sittlichkeit)
Hegel’s main undertaking of Ethical Life (the German Sittlichkeit indicates the fundamental social nature of ethics and includes things like tradition and custom) is in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right so some of what I’m talking about from Jameson will probably be mixed up with that book. Jameson explains Hegel’s rejection of Kantian ethics as the imposition of the restrictive external law, the Sollen. Instead of alienated externally imposed rules, Hegelian ethics seeks immanence and activity (Tätigkeit). For Hegel, each party should see themselves within social institutions as objective manifestations of themselves. In this way, laws are not externally imposed, but rather active embodiments of all individuals’ wills. This is why the central theme of The Philosophy of Right is that the will wills the free will. Each party within society (subjective will) must acknowledge its own will within objective social institutions (objective will). They must recognize objective social institutions as their own production that carry their will. The contradiction between individual freedom and social necessity is dissolved and brought into harmony as social institutions become objective manifestations of freedom itself. (We see here another Fichtean influence on Hegel: the subject-object. I was very happy to see Jameson acknowledge this and articulate Sittlichkeit in these terms).
This is Hegel’s answer to alienated society and his vision of what a truly human society looks like. Marx’s great critique of alienated society under capitalism would be impossible without Hegel and it is no mistake that Marx’s central text on alienation, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, includes a close examination of the Phenomenology. Jameson points out that this has obviously not played out under late capitalism and that we feel more alienated from social institutions than ever before. This is another point in which we really see how brilliant Marx was at productively exposing Hegel’s deficiencies and building upon them. In the famous introduction to Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx claims that German philosophy is actually ahead of its time and that the praxis is in fact still catching up. Marx recognized the greatness of Hegel’s social vision, but, unlike Hegel, knew that the end of capitalism was the only way to actualize it.
December 15, 2016
With now eponymous superpowers of syntax, Jameson piles clause upon clause to construct (or would it be better: digs deeper clause by clause to exhume) an undying Hegel (just kidding, he dies and is reborn every day!) who perhaps alone can help us conceptualize what exactly the fuck is happening. Yet Jameson is no doctrinaire disciple: for all that is recuperated, much is relinquished. Though the text of the Phenomenology today is what it was two hundred years ago, Spirit is not, and it is quite cunning to realize that Hegel is more correct today than he was then when he said that the little which passes for Spirit reveals how far it has fallen. To grasp the Notion for yourself as to what Spirit could still be, there's Jameson.
August 16, 2023
Feels good being able to finish a book you have struggled to read(and dropped) 😊
October 24, 2024
The last chapters on the end of history - or the beginning of history -, are superb.
August 6, 2010
Much to my surprise this book was short and easy to read. Also to my surprise was that the book's reading of Hegel was not very intense - hardly revolutionary (in every sense of the word). The most interesting thing Jameson accomplishes - and it may warrant reading the book, I've not decided - is his explanation of key concepts in dialectics through metaphors, many musical. The highlight for me was when he took a detour through Adorno's aesthetics to show how the identity of the universal and the particular is analogous to the use of the theme in the music of Beethoven.
Marxist-types will be disappointed; Jameson's Marxism is difficult to locate. When he calls, at the end, for us to come up with new paradigms for understanding today, I gasped - isn't the premise of a Marxist critique that the new paradigms keep us from seeing what is old in the New, that this age remains that of capitalism? Jameson finds himself grouped with the "postmodernist deconstructivists" Zizek always sets up as his theoretical opponents. Maybe a few gems for people serious about Hegel. Not essential.
Marxist-types will be disappointed; Jameson's Marxism is difficult to locate. When he calls, at the end, for us to come up with new paradigms for understanding today, I gasped - isn't the premise of a Marxist critique that the new paradigms keep us from seeing what is old in the New, that this age remains that of capitalism? Jameson finds himself grouped with the "postmodernist deconstructivists" Zizek always sets up as his theoretical opponents. Maybe a few gems for people serious about Hegel. Not essential.
January 2, 2025
jameson has a singular way of making things click for me. will definitely come back to this in the future. one day soon, when i finally feel ready to read the phenomenology!
this particularly stayed with me:
« Narcissism seems to me a better way of identifying what may sometimes be felt to be repulsive in the Hegelian system as such. It is not so much the all-encompassing ambition of the Hegelian philosophical project-sometimes stigmatized as totalization-which is particularly offensive (as the existentialists thought who objected to the reduction of their own individual experience to one moment of the dialectic): for we continue to try to grasp totalities, whether phenomenologically or in some other way, and we continue to try to make connections between the isolated fragments of our thinking and of our experience. Nor is idealism the most telling reproach, if what is in question is merely the translation of the world into consciousness or the Subject (for the existentialists did as much, in their own fashion, nor is the Subject in question necessarily a centered one, as we have tried to show here).
No, the most serious drawback to the Hegelian system seems to me rather the way in which it conceives of speculative thinking as "the consummation of itself" (namely, of Reason). Reason, he says there, "must demand that difference, that being, in its manifold variety, become its very own, that it behold itself as the actual world and find itself present as a shape and Thing." We thereby search the whole world, and outer space, and end up only touching ourselves, only seeing our own face persist through multitudinous differences and forms of otherness. Never truly to encounter the not-I, to come face to face with radical otherness (or even worse, to find ourselves in an historical dynamic in which it is precisely difference and otherness which is relentlessly being stamped out): such is the dilemma of the Hegelian dialectic, which contemporary philosophies of difference and otherness seem only able to confront with mystical evocations and imperatives. But it is a reproach which may well primarily challenge the Hegelian system as such, rather than the Phenomenology, whose heterogeneities we have tried to display here.
Meanwhile, as for Absolute Spirit, it is above all urgent not to think of it as a "moment," historical or otherwise ... »
this particularly stayed with me:
« Narcissism seems to me a better way of identifying what may sometimes be felt to be repulsive in the Hegelian system as such. It is not so much the all-encompassing ambition of the Hegelian philosophical project-sometimes stigmatized as totalization-which is particularly offensive (as the existentialists thought who objected to the reduction of their own individual experience to one moment of the dialectic): for we continue to try to grasp totalities, whether phenomenologically or in some other way, and we continue to try to make connections between the isolated fragments of our thinking and of our experience. Nor is idealism the most telling reproach, if what is in question is merely the translation of the world into consciousness or the Subject (for the existentialists did as much, in their own fashion, nor is the Subject in question necessarily a centered one, as we have tried to show here).
No, the most serious drawback to the Hegelian system seems to me rather the way in which it conceives of speculative thinking as "the consummation of itself" (namely, of Reason). Reason, he says there, "must demand that difference, that being, in its manifold variety, become its very own, that it behold itself as the actual world and find itself present as a shape and Thing." We thereby search the whole world, and outer space, and end up only touching ourselves, only seeing our own face persist through multitudinous differences and forms of otherness. Never truly to encounter the not-I, to come face to face with radical otherness (or even worse, to find ourselves in an historical dynamic in which it is precisely difference and otherness which is relentlessly being stamped out): such is the dilemma of the Hegelian dialectic, which contemporary philosophies of difference and otherness seem only able to confront with mystical evocations and imperatives. But it is a reproach which may well primarily challenge the Hegelian system as such, rather than the Phenomenology, whose heterogeneities we have tried to display here.
Meanwhile, as for Absolute Spirit, it is above all urgent not to think of it as a "moment," historical or otherwise ... »
April 10, 2019
I'll be rereading this one a few times before I'm comfortable reviewing it.
August 6, 2024
A great modern companion piece for the Phenomenology of Spirit.
August 14, 2013
Jameson can be an arrogant bore who makes intersting material sound worthless, but this book is good. If you thought you understood Hegel as "thesis, antithisis, synthesis" read this book. Hegel is not just Plato warmed over. Hegel is a mountain. Jameson really helps us here to climb it.
August 30, 2020
jameson reads hegel against the grain here, the notion that the phenomenology forms a bildungsroman that walks us from the most primeval forms of sense-data to world-spirit in the abstract, that synthesis can be read as a progessive eventuality, are repudiated in favour of a reading of the phenomenology as a dialectics of negation, a critique of origins, a theory of language as a symptom of modern alienation and all the familiar bugbears of contemporary critical theory. this is all proven and argued in typical jamesonian style, it is virtuoso performance, but it's also slightly irritating that jameson is riffing rather than reading hegel as hegel in himself. maybe i'm coming to jameson for the wrong reasons, but i would love if a brain as big as his would take the time to help me grasp some of the more involved aspects of hegel's philosophy rather than read hegel as jameson avant la lettre
September 29, 2025
briefly touched upon jameson‘s slim study on the phenomenology of spirit in the my review of hegel's book itself, but here it is more expanded. it‘s definitely miles more accessible than the source material, but there are passages where some of jameson‘s brilliance went over my head. i’ll attempt a brief summary, but definitely read for yourself!
the theme of jameson’s non-teleological reading of hegel rests on the borrowed-from-adorno musical term ‘variation’, an assortment of different arrangements that more or less are arrangements of the same theme tune. jameson draws attention away from the oft-depicted upward-spiral structure culminating in absolute spirit to, instead, the process, the repetition of the same movement found in the different sublations of the different categories.
in other words, jameson is trying to prevent the hegel of the phenemonology of spirit from being reified into the doctrine of hegelianism. the different chapters in this book, then, could be read as variations of this theme, such as the structural problems in the phenomenology or the notion of spirit as always denoting a collective.
my very unlearned opinion on this is that i am inclined to agree on open readings, but i’m very curious about the book’s final (and incredibly short chapter) that touches on perhaps a fatal flaw in the hegelian system—that no matter the journey of reason, we always return to the self/whatever we hold as subject that persists through all the variations we considered. to “never truly […] to come face to face with radical otherness.” given jameson’s (imo correct) disregard for the linear progression of the absolute, would this not be too much of a capitulation? and if the phenomenology should be read for its method, then what sort of concrete world must we ‘smuggle’ in to fill its gap of content? perhaps i must rethink philosophy after hegel and dialectics itself? these are some of the questions i parted with hegel variations.
the theme of jameson’s non-teleological reading of hegel rests on the borrowed-from-adorno musical term ‘variation’, an assortment of different arrangements that more or less are arrangements of the same theme tune. jameson draws attention away from the oft-depicted upward-spiral structure culminating in absolute spirit to, instead, the process, the repetition of the same movement found in the different sublations of the different categories.
in other words, jameson is trying to prevent the hegel of the phenemonology of spirit from being reified into the doctrine of hegelianism. the different chapters in this book, then, could be read as variations of this theme, such as the structural problems in the phenomenology or the notion of spirit as always denoting a collective.
my very unlearned opinion on this is that i am inclined to agree on open readings, but i’m very curious about the book’s final (and incredibly short chapter) that touches on perhaps a fatal flaw in the hegelian system—that no matter the journey of reason, we always return to the self/whatever we hold as subject that persists through all the variations we considered. to “never truly […] to come face to face with radical otherness.” given jameson’s (imo correct) disregard for the linear progression of the absolute, would this not be too much of a capitulation? and if the phenomenology should be read for its method, then what sort of concrete world must we ‘smuggle’ in to fill its gap of content? perhaps i must rethink philosophy after hegel and dialectics itself? these are some of the questions i parted with hegel variations.
March 14, 2020
Hegel is notoriously difficult and some would say incoherent anyways, which makes coherent and accessible secondary literature that much more important. I’ve a decent background in philosophy, and still found Jameson’s work hard to follow. Part of that is my unfamiliarity with some of the people/concepts he references—for example, Dosroyevskian dialectic—but the other part is his failure or lack of desire to even briefly explain what he means by the reference before quickly moving onto the next one. So, not a super friendly text to the beginner or intermediate reader.
June 4, 2025
I'm exhausted by Hegel. Its ruined my life and mind, but that is philosophy for you. I need to go back to religious/agricultural fantasy novels, but this book helped me understand the second half of the phenomenology a little better and to situate it among more recent interpretations. The second half is basically trying to do what he did with consciousness on a meta/social level tracking movements of collective consciousness through various iterations of modern forms of alienation, family, state, nation, politics and religion.
January 28, 2020
An excellent 'variation' on what is apparently quite a few interpretations of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. I picked this up wanting a thorough introduction to Hegel's notorious thinking (and there is probably no one I would rather turn to for this than Jameson). While by no means disappointed, nonetheless I am sure I would have gotten more out of this very brief text if I had read Phenomenology of Spirit first.
December 24, 2017
great explication of hegels system of thpught, sweeping away common vulgarizations and half truths. but seems to lack a motivation in its own right and probably only worth reading in conjuctuon with other texts in the dialectical tradtion, so as to consummate the ideas into concrete analysis.
May 6, 2022
Kind of hard to follow at points, but I got quite a bit out of reading it. It’s short, so I’ll definitely be reading it again at some point. The most interesting part to me was how it connects to Marx.
January 27, 2018
Decent — not groundbreaking — but quite decent.
August 3, 2021
pretty decent non-teleological readin of hegel
May 20, 2022
Mediocre Jameson and not particularly enlightening when it comes to Hegel or the Phenomenology.
November 1, 2022
Jameson, at least, agrees we're not quite done with Hegel yet.
February 21, 2023
A short but dense book on the philosopher whom Jameson rightly calls "the sage"
April 7, 2024
Read this in one sitting at the LSE library so my brain is going crazy rn but Jameson rarely misses and I think this is quite a coherent deconstruction of Hegel as a non-teleological thinker
May 6, 2024
New reading of Hegel that is non-teleological. The book touched some concepts like 'end of history' of Kojeve. I did not follow some of the arguments. I understood only 40% of it.
April 8, 2025
Thus begins my Young Hegelian transformation
Read
October 30, 2025the quote selection can be good sometimes but it feels like jameson is in over his head
September 20, 2022
Don't let the size fool you, this is a fascinating engagement with the Phenomenology. Jameson's dialectical engagement with Hegel here is very productive, and this book is absolutely full of powerful insights and observations.
As the front cover states, the Hegel we encounter here is a "non-teleological" Hegel. For Jameson, this keyword indicates his attempts to avoid reading a systematic, closed, anthropomorphizing, "reified" Hegelianism. Instead, he finds a Hegel who is variously deconstructive, Maoist, and proto-Marxist. Unfortunately for us, the very usage of philosophical language leads us straight into the opposite tendency, a tendency that must be constantly fought against, and a problem that partially accounts for the inherent difficulty of thinking through the Phenomenology. One of the paradoxes of the dialect that Jameson struggles with here is the fact that as soon as one tries to turn it into a methodology, it ceases to be dialectical.
Jameson as a thinker is perfectly suited to do this difficult work on Hegel. He is able to skillfully maneuver through the Phenomenology without falling into the trap of reifying Hegel into a system or a method. His approach is also balanced and realistic, without falling into the rhetorical excesses some expositors of Hegel are susceptible to. While he rejects systematic, conservative, and triadic (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) readings of Hegel, he does admit that all of these readings have their justifications to some degree.
This is the first work by Jameson I've read, and I was expecting it to be dry and overly academic based on the many complaints I've heard about his style; however, I was pleasantly surprised by how good the writing was. I found myself re-reading long passages because of how well the ideas flowed one into the other. Lacking a true guiding thesis (beyond a constantly resurfacing musical metaphor borrowed from Adorno's "variations without a theme") this text is a sequence of brilliant readings of different aspects of the Phenomenology, culminating in a long discussion of the Master-Slave Dialectic, and how it can be plausibly extended into postmodernity and beyond. I found the chapters on Language, Spirit, and Revolution to be particularly valuable.
As the front cover states, the Hegel we encounter here is a "non-teleological" Hegel. For Jameson, this keyword indicates his attempts to avoid reading a systematic, closed, anthropomorphizing, "reified" Hegelianism. Instead, he finds a Hegel who is variously deconstructive, Maoist, and proto-Marxist. Unfortunately for us, the very usage of philosophical language leads us straight into the opposite tendency, a tendency that must be constantly fought against, and a problem that partially accounts for the inherent difficulty of thinking through the Phenomenology. One of the paradoxes of the dialect that Jameson struggles with here is the fact that as soon as one tries to turn it into a methodology, it ceases to be dialectical.
Jameson as a thinker is perfectly suited to do this difficult work on Hegel. He is able to skillfully maneuver through the Phenomenology without falling into the trap of reifying Hegel into a system or a method. His approach is also balanced and realistic, without falling into the rhetorical excesses some expositors of Hegel are susceptible to. While he rejects systematic, conservative, and triadic (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) readings of Hegel, he does admit that all of these readings have their justifications to some degree.
This is the first work by Jameson I've read, and I was expecting it to be dry and overly academic based on the many complaints I've heard about his style; however, I was pleasantly surprised by how good the writing was. I found myself re-reading long passages because of how well the ideas flowed one into the other. Lacking a true guiding thesis (beyond a constantly resurfacing musical metaphor borrowed from Adorno's "variations without a theme") this text is a sequence of brilliant readings of different aspects of the Phenomenology, culminating in a long discussion of the Master-Slave Dialectic, and how it can be plausibly extended into postmodernity and beyond. I found the chapters on Language, Spirit, and Revolution to be particularly valuable.
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews