Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution

by Todd McGowan

Hegel is making a comeback. After the decline of the Marxist Hegelianism that dominated the twentieth century, leading thinkers are rediscovering Hegel’s thought as a resource for contemporary politics. What does a notoriously difficult nineteenth-century German philosopher have to offer the present? How should we understand Hegel, and what does understanding Hegel teach us about confronting our most urgent challenges?

In this book, Todd McGowan offers us a Hegel for the twenty-first century. Simultaneously an introduction to Hegel and a fundamental reimagining of Hegel’s project, Emancipation After Hegel presents a radical Hegel who speaks to a world overwhelmed by right-wing populism, authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and economic inequalities. McGowan argues that the revolutionary core of Hegel’s thought is contradiction. He reveals that contradiction is inexorable and that we must attempt to sustain it rather than overcoming it or dismissing it as a logical failure. McGowan contends that Hegel’s notion of contradiction, when applied to contemporary problems, challenges any assertion of unitary identity as every identity is in tension with itself and dependent on others. An accessible and compelling reinterpretation of an often-misunderstood thinker, this book shows us a way forward to a new politics of emancipation as we reconcile ourselves to the inevitability of contradiction and find solidarity in not belonging.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction, Theory, Psychoanalysis, History

288 pages, Hardcover

Published May 28, 2019

About the author

Todd McGowan is Associate Professor of Film at the University of Vermont, US. He is the author of The Fictional Christopher Nolan (2012), Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema (2011), The Impossible David Lynch (2007), The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan (2007), and other books.

Reviews

[Alan Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've tried more than a few times to make my way into Hegel's thought. About fifteen years ago, I burrowed and penetrated ever so slightly into The Phenomenology of Spirit, only to be defeated and retreat. I read some Kojeve, but felt that his interpretations were perhaps too idiosyncratic. A few summers ago, accompanied by three commentaries, I made it about half way through The Science of Logic before I felt like I was uselessly spinning my wheels. I've read numerous works about Hegel and/or the dialectic, but inevitably feel that the authors have some desire to bury Hegel, or are simplifying him to the point of uselessness, or don't really understand him themselves. Some who are sympathetic to his work incorporate it into their own systems but don't particularly spend much energy explicating or introducing those ideas beforehand. The Marxists I've read either dismiss him entirely or dismiss him by saying that whatever was useful in his thought was incorporated by Marx into his own work, thus no need to go back to the "idealist Hegel." And yet, through it all, I kept feeling myself drawn back towards his thought. In the list of philosophers, Hegel has remained something of the final frontier for me.

And so it was a monumental surprise to finally find THE text which I've been searching for all my damn intellectual life.

I mean, rattle off some of the philosophers that appeal to me and I can snap off the names of other philosophers who have magnificent books about them/their ideas.

Lacan = Bruce Fink
Marx = David Harvey
Badiou = Peter Hallward
Deleuze and Guattari = Eugene W. Holland

And now I can add to the list:
Hegel = Todd McGowan

Todd has written some other brilliant books about psychoanalysis, Lacan, film, David Lynch, capitalism. This book will likely appeal most to those with interest in psychoanalysis, Marxism, Zizek; with that in mind, this is a work about Hegel, and a lack of familiarity with these other systems/thinkers will pose minimal barrier for entry.

This text provides a deeply sympathetic and perhaps somewhat idiosyncratic reading of Hegel's ideas. McGowan does seem to be a part of a neo-Hegelian school that includes Zizek, Adrian Johnston, and Catherine Malabou; that said, no-one seems to friggin' agree about hardly any aspect of Hegel thought, so what is a syncratic reading of Hegel, anyway?

The book isn't a commentary of any one of Hegel's texts, though it does include analysis of many of this works; nor is it a biography of his life, though it does include some historical/biographical details; this isn't a work of McGowan-esque philosophy in which he incorporates Hegel into his own system, though he is reading Hegel through a McGowan analytic filter; nor can it be described as an intro-text, for it is much richer and more interesting than that.

In essence, it provides a particular core interpretation of Hegel, which is that the old chestnut about thesis, antithesis, and synthesis is B***s***, and a more accurate understanding is that "contradiction is not mere opposition" [...] "Instead, contradiction occurs when a position follows its own logic and thereby finds itself at odds with itself" [...] Every position ultimately undermines itself by exposing its own internal division." And that if you follow a series of contradictions long enough, you don't eventually end at a contradiction-free zone, but, in fact, the opposite, in which there is a realization that "contradiction is not a problem to be eliminated but the driving force of all movement in being. One cannot arrive at a synthesis that would eliminate contradiction because contradiction is the basic fact of all being."

Absolute knowing is therefore not, "the point at which the subject knows everything that there is to know, but rather the point at which the subject recognizes that there are no more conceivable paths out of contradiction."

With this core analysis, McGowan then goes through many of Hegel's thoughts and gives them a shine, revitalizing via reinterpretation some of the controversial and/or contested ideas, such as Hegel's insistence on the central importance of Christianity above all other religions, and the necessity of the state (and even the monarchy) for human freedom. It is a testament to McGowan's prowess that his arguments regarding these issues are convincingly made.

Throughout, McGowan gives many novel/provocative insights into Hegelian thought, including the foundational importance of love to his system, on how psychoanalytical concepts can help explicate his ideas ("Coming Too Soon" lol), how Marx was a "rightist" deviation of Hegel, discussing some of the major controversies (e.g., how to read/understand his most misunderstood work The Philosophy of History), and not hiding from some of the real issues/problems. It is such a broad but well rounded work, touching on so many issues and ideas, I walked away from this text feeling like a portal into a new Hegelian world had been opened for me, the book a kind of skeleton key finally making a deep dive into Hegel's work a real possibility for me.

If I could remove one half of one star, I would simply because the implications of McGowan's readings of Hegel on the project of emancipation, for example, communism, remain under-developed, perhaps intentionally so. I mean, it was the title of the book, so even an entire chapter dedicated to the subject would have been warranted. Perhaps another book, Todd? Or a podcast episode? Pretty please? Just a few more examples of how the idea of sustaining and deepening contradiction might be employed in an anti-capitalist way would have been appreciated. I have a few ideas about it, but, again, I'd have liked a bit more.

And McGowan is a beautiful and clear writer. He has a way of explaining an idea by repeating it two or three different ways, but each time subtly different and from a different angle such that the ideas truly come to live in the mind. On my first reading, I went through the whole thing slowing underlining. It is a indicative of the concision/potency of the writing that practically half of it is now marked.

I am grateful for this book. It was also a pleasure to read. It was the perfect book to have read at this time in my life. I have turned my sights back again towards Hegel, and I have Todd McGowan to thank for this.

Highly recommended.

[Karl Hallbjörnsson · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book has an exorbitantly high rating for no good reason. Stay clear of anyone who insists that Hegel is only understandable through Freud—stay well clear. To be honest, I hate the guy's writing style as well—the feel of the book was slightly off. This is like maybe a 1.5-2 out of 5 for me to be honest. If you were to take McGowan's gushing seriously, you'd likely be misled to think that it's all thanks to Slavoj Zizek that Hegel is considered philosophically relevant and valuable again—completely wrong. Get a room, Todd.

He doesn't do a good job explaining the doppelsatz from the Philosophy of Right, he keeps repeating the same points over and over again (yes, we get it, Hegel works by way of contradiction—I'm still trying not to laugh at another reviewer of this piece of work who actually said "many people have overlooked the centrality of contradiction in Hegel's philosophy"... pfffft). He doesn't seem to understand the role of Absolute Knowing in the Phenomenology (which is not at all "the pinnacle" of Hegel's philosphy, but rather the very starting point). He uses these annoyingly dumb examples, like when he asserts that a poor person aspiring to riches is actually contradicting themselves...? What? The Freud point was just infuriatingly wrong and imbecilic—and its not like its "just a point" either—the whole stupid Freudian reading permeates the whole argument and feel of the book. Finally, the book does not, in fact, offer anything even remotely close to a "Contradictory Revolution."

I'd recommend that you read, well, pretty much anyone else instead. Read Stern, Houlgate, Pippin, Brandom, Malabou—just leave this book alone. For god's sake, just read Hegel himself!

[Iben Bollaert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Onwaarschijnlijk goede inleiding tot Hegel, een aanrader voor alle liefhebbers.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 stars I guess? I got progressively more angry as I wrote this review so I'm not sure. 2.5 seems too low. Anyway: some essential insights here that have helped grant me greater access to the Phenomenology. The major one, for me, was the discussion of how it took the development of psycholanalytic discourse to develop the conceptual tools required to make Hegel finally make sense. McGowan hits Hegel's unreadability head on and gives him credit where it's due. He was essentially inventing psychoanalysis and only had the paltry, obscure, classical-tinged language of German idealism to express his ideas. Zizek discovered this and you simply have to give him that. Reading Hegel back through the lens of psychoanalysis will yield serious results. McGowan illuminates that Hegel is not a thinker of synthesis or of recognition - he is someone who is dedicated to seeing how there is no position beyond contradiction. You will never eliminate it and any attempt to would be basically fascist. All well and good. (Also he's got a good synoptic look at how the various works integrate into a broader system so, if I ever feel up to reading the Logic, I feel prepared.)

But there's an awful lot not to like in here too. First, the editing. It's horrendous. The typos come thick and fast and they are pretty damaging to the sense of a couple pages. Super distracting. In addition, the book is horribly repetitive and the amount of footnotes and their interspersal throughout almost every page is completely intrusive and a little pedantic (half the time, it could have been included in the main text.... I was going to skip them entirely but stumbled on a couple significant ones and then was trapped reading them all, jumping back and forth constantly.

But my main beef with this guy is his ambivalent politics. I think I'd even just say his fundamental lack of seriousness when it comes to politics. He is constantly talking about how so and so isn't radical enough, that Hegel is more radical than so and so, so and so doesn't understand the assumptions they are making in their argument (which is dubious i think in a couple places - i think frequently the thinkers he's engaged with have thought about them and simply made them...). But for all this talk about radicality, he doesn't seem to have a radical bone in him. As far as I can tell, his politics is that once you "think the absolute" and reconcile yourself with the contradiction of all subjects and that there is no substantial Big Other that Knows, you're done. A lot of this comes from McGowan's priveleging of contradiction above opposition.

I'm sure I'm in the minority here. It's not generally accepted to see politics in the Schmittian friend/enemy sense but I mean, when you're squaring up to jump a deadlock through political combat, that's what you do, you draw an opposition, there's no politics without antagonism *when debating about the universal container of politics, ie the shape of the state*. I've listened to him talk with Slavoj Zizek and he seemed to have a problem with Zizek identifying as a Marxist for the debate with Jordan Peterson. Sure, Marx posits a telos, a resolution to contradiction in the some substantial future that will never arrive. But the Marxist signifier is to signal a pugnacious anticaptialism grounded in collective resistance. McGowan simply doesn't get it. To McGowan, it seems as though, if you just got enough people to a.) read Hegel and b.) understand Hegel (huge leap!) then maybe capitalism can be ...what? If come to grips with absolute knowing, the permanance of contradiction, then the royal road to freedom is open to you. That sounds an awful lot like existentialism to me (an early strong influence for McGowan). But what did Sartre do? He realized his form of thought was politically quietist and he delved deeper into Marxism. I can't speak to the success of his attempt to fuse Marxism and existentialism as I haven't read the critique of dialectical reason but, on McGowan's show, he dedicates 2 giant episodes to Being and Nothingness and 1 episode to the two volume set of the Critique which, to many, is the real deal. It's illuminating that McGowan is more interested in his pre-Marxism. And that's fine, you can dig the early hits. But you can't walk around pretending to be an anticapitalist and you can't have a mature sense of politics if you won't simply accept the fact that, to maintain a political stance, you need to draw a line, to make a cut. Popular politics means creating a collective identity that, of course, is contradictory. So what? Grow up. If you're going to talk about how Hegel's Spirit wants you to "get your hands dirty" then just get em dirty bro. He has a problem that the left hates billionaires (stated on his podcast, a theme of his latest book)? Again, grow up. People on the left are not substantializing billionaires. But, if you want to eliminate the injustices of the capitalist system then guess what? You're going to have to eliminate the position which billionaires and the obscenely rich take up within the current system. We don't need to be concerned with the actual person...just take their wealth.

But he really gives the game away when he says "But rather than contenting himself with exposing the contradiction of capitalist production, Marx provides a fantasy of overcoming it." Mind you, he didn't say a fantasy of overcoming contradiction - he said a fantasy of overcoming *this specific contradition* by supplanting it with another mode of production, by swapping one contradiction for another. The latter is simply impermissable for him I guess? He is literally saying it's the philosopher's job to interpret the world, not to change it. But beyond that, the flow of his book suggests even the non-philosopher shouldn't change the world. All well and good to be a conservative and say these things, that shakes out. But you can't pretend to be radical and constantly judge whether some work of art or philosophy or thinker is radical enough like Hegel's own morbid beautiful soul and say these things. You can't be an anticapitalist and just "do Hegel." That's why Zizek has the whole Hegel/Lacan/Marx schtick. I think McGowan literally believes you are signing off on Stalin's pogroms and the purges if you take the Marxist position. He actually has to say in the book: "This is not a recipe for quietism..." He had to say it because we of course aren't sure. I'm unconvinced. Quite frankly, he doesn't make a compelling case for his statement that "Emancipatory politics, in contrast, refuses to see contradiction as opposition." I think he's mistaking religious conversion for mass politics. It's interesting learning from his podcast that he considered at one time becoming a priest or something because there's something very monkish about his outlook. He sees politics as ministering to the misguided I suppose, and that's useful. But it's not a movement. It's not a mass politics. And it's not a revolution. Besides - no Marxist worth their salt would still be counting on "a fantasy of harmonious social relations." I'm not asking for a plan but you can't be a complete hypocrite and not act and judge everyone else's calls to action. It's right there in Hegel in the chapter on morality - it's not allowed!

In short - he's a little absurd for subtitling the work with the phrase "a contradictory revolution." You can't use the word revolution if you don't want one. I'll be honest, writing that really made me mad, remembering his use of the word. Plus he just keeps doing the same rhetorical move - you still remain within the logic you contest! Again, hyper repetitive.

Anyway that's one central problem I'm circling around w/r/t McGowan. But there are a few howlers in this. He even goes so far as to say that Hegel's philosophical development allowed him to be able to have sex. No lie. And there are a few remarks on that level in here (the Nazis saw Hegel as their mortal enemy...? or something to that effect, a few eyebrow raisers and shoulder shrug BOLD STATEMENTS). Oh right here's an INSANE EMBARRASSING REMARK: "our image of Marx as the more politically significant philosopher is due for revision".

Glad I read it but am unsure about reading more. I would say just read the introduction and the first two chapters and you're gold. At least I'll say this for him: I find it infuriating how Marxist children constantly find excuses not to read, not to study, not to engage in theory. McGowan starts to make a case for the importance of engaging in philosophy and I'm with him there. I'm also mostly into his reading of Hegel. But this sure is a CONTRADICTORY book.

[Campbell Rider]

very good + accessible intro

[Stefanos · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you take a shot every time McGowan mentions contradiction, you’ll reach the Absolute!

As a primer to a particular way of reading Hegel, let’s say a Zizek-adjacent one, Emancipation after Hegel is very good and readable; if only a bit repetitive. McGowan’s interpretation makes sense to me, though over-relying on contradiction risks flattening Hegel’s thought. As a foundation for emancipatory projects, there are appealing elements here (no substantive authority, universality, dialectical thinking etc.). However, I was rolling my eyes towards the end, especially with McGowan’s defense of Hegel’s constitutional monarchy and his claim that Marx was a “right-wing deviation of Hegel”. Many reviews focus on the philosophical aspects of the book (which is probably the majority of the book) so I’ll focus a bit more on the political.

Contradiction, or self-negation (A is A, but also not A), has an ontological status in McGowan’s interpretation of Hegel. Contradictions are inescapable, but they are also what drive being, thought and history forward. Hegel’s dialectic does not culminate in synthesis or harmonious totality, but in a movement toward ever more intractable contradictions.

Good news (?): if all identities are self-negating, then there is no substantial authority; we can’t rely on God, King, President, or “the People” etc., and the possibility of freedom, equality, and solidarity are opens up.
This is also clear in Hegel’s reading of Christianity: God becomes human, is humiliated, and doubts his own existence (“Father, why have you forsaken me?”). God itself is recognized as self-divided. The “God of the beyond” dies on the cross, leaving only the Holy Spirit behind; the egalitarian community of believers.

However, negating authority and existing norms (whether biological, social, or political) is only a precondition for freedom, not its full realization. Rebellion against authority (à la Camus’ rebel) leaves one’s identity tied and dependent to the very authority resisted; locked into an endless cycle of opposition. Freedom also requires positive expressions; concrete, self-directed action.

Capitalist and right-wing thought denies internal contradiction and relies on external opposition: “IF ONLY we removed/repressed the enemy (bad regulations, immigrants, trans people, ...), embraced our particular identities, then society/economy would be harmonious”.

In contrast, to think dialectically is not to imagine external oppositions (“friend vs. enemy,” “the West vs. Islam” etc. not even “good worker” vs ”bad capitalist”) but to recognize these relations as internal contradictions of the broader system.
Emancipation, then, involves universality. None are free, until all are free. For example, BLM: there can be no universal as long as black lives do not matter.

This is very much in line with my understanding of Marx's thought. If Hegel discovers the inescapability of contradiction as the prerequisite for freedom in thought (a change in perspective), Marx examines the material conditions necessary for the actualization (or expansion) of freedom in practice.

Why then McGowan reads Marx as a “right-wing” deviation of Hegel?
He sees Marx’s analysis of political economy as a valuable and compatible expansion of Hegel’s thought but argues “rather than contenting himself with exposing the contradiction of capitalist production, Marx provides a fantasy of overcoming it [...] communism as a solution to the contradictions of capitalism.”.

McGowan later adds: “A society can move beyond a specific contradiction, but it will necessarily encounter another one. [...] This is Hegel’s definition of progress: the movement from more easily resolved social contradictions to more intractable ones”.
Ironically, even Lenin and Mao would not disagree with McGowan here. Mao wrote: “Some naive ideas suggest that contradictions no longer exist in a socialist society. To deny contradictions is to deny dialectics” and quoted Lenin: “Antagonism and contradiction are not at all one and the same. Under socialism, the first will disappear, the second will remain.”

An emancipatory project aims to satisfy human needs, enhance well-being (i.e., access to resources, healthcare, more free time, etc.), expand the space for concrete, self-directed action etc. This does not mean that all problems will be solved in a utopian future beyond contradiction.

Arguing that “if future society could live without contradiction, one could plausibly argue that the gulag is worth it”, misrepresents Marx's thought (relying on generic anti-marxist caricatures) and McGowan’s logic here sounds eerily close to conservative arguments, as if seeking any progress/improvement will lead to the gulags. Ughhh

I doubt this is his actual position, but if not, it is far from well-argued or clarified in the book. If progress (even a cautious progress towards “more intractable contradictions”) does not entail tangible improvements, then why talk about emancipation at all? Why not accept the current contradictions of capitalism and struggle for “more intractable contradictions”? We might as well sit back and watch the world burn while we image ourselves free...

[Rosa Angelone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible book. 

It makes Hegel and his detractors and Hegel's self described disciples accessible. I had a basic pop culture understanding of Hegel..I knew Thesis:antithesis: Thesis, Minerva spreading her wings, and The End of History.  

Todd McGowan was able to take me as a reader along with him as he talks through why Hegel was interested in what he spent his lifetime writing about.  I now have a whole list of authors to look up and I finally feel able to jump into the competing visions of Hegel. 

and not for nothing. In a time where I feel The State shaking like King Arthur's Roundtable after Mordred got a hold of it, a clear eyed look at what it means to be truly equal and full of Contradiction is exactly what I needed. 

[Edward Backman · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is an amusingly frustrated 1 star review of this book here. It features precisely the same complaint I expected to find as I worked through the closing sections. Why is there no guidance on how to act revolutionarily?? HOW do we achieve a contradictory revolution? For those with these sorts of political questions burning in their minds, this text will no doubt be highly disappointing.

Hegel's philosophy itself accordingly has a disappointment or a tragedy to it. 'Absolute knowing': what is it? The name has a misleading grandeur, but nonetheless, as McGowan convincingly demonstrates, it is imperative for us, and for any emancipatory politics that we think in absolute terms. Hegel is the emancipatory revolutionary thinker we need. Every section of every chapter of McGowan's book drives towards this unintuitive thesis by applying absolute knowledge, a kind of faculty maybe, to a myriad of cases.

In the last chapter he argues (rightly I think) that Marx was a conservative or rightist deviation from the more radical Hegel. Marx misses the radical ('absolute') standpoint in which one recognizes that there are no possible social orders free from contradiction, no harmonious societies which are not opposed to themselves. Capitalist relations are the enemy responsible for contradiction. Marx's insistence the contradiction can be finally overcome by abolishing the enemy--this is basically a right wing fantasy.

But McGowan is careful to guard against any dismal or quietist readings of Hegel's position. In my favourite passage McGowan follows Catherine Malabou's reading of Absolute knowledge; the absolute is not "a moment that eliminates all difference but ... an explosion of it. ... when we reach the absolute, we reach a moment of complete openness to transformation. ... At this point, openness to unknown possibilities ensues, possibilities that are not prefigured within the dialectic that precedes them.' (179) A very un-marxist revolutionary standpoint, that our future contains possibilities which are NOT at our disposal. Possibilities which do not overcome contradiction but cut through them. Possibilities our experts cannot engineer, and our philosophers cannot prescribe. (I would call this eschatology :)) It does not get more radical than that.

Apart from these philosophical notes, it also needs to be said that McGowan's scholarship is very impressive as always. He cites Plato, Deleuze, everyone in between and more than enough Hegel scholars for one lifetime of Hegel reading. Every time he cites Hegel, the original German is included in the endnotes. This is not to mention his frequent use of film and pop culture.

Zizek is right about this book: "In a truly democratic country, Emancipation after Hegel would be reprinted in hundreds of thousands of copies and distributed for free to all students. Read this book ... or ignore it at your own risk!"

[Durakov · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wouldn't normally rate a book without reading the whole thing, but I think I gave this one a fair shot and read through more than half before skimming the remainder and found it looked very similar. That was enough to see what McGowan is offering here, which is, on the surface, 1. a bunch a shortish variations on how Hegel theorizes contradiction, but is also 2. a defense of Hegel's relevance, and 3. an attempt to make a notoriously unappealing thinker more palatable.

It can't be denied that McGowan accomplishes the first, but how successfully depends on your ability to abide quite a bit of repetition. It started to become tiresome for me about 100 pages in. As for 2, I'm not so sure I'd walk away believing Hegel was any more relevant than any other difficult philosopher if I didn't already have my reasons for believing he was (which are not necessarily the same as McGowan's). He is definitely trying to do žižek's thing of explicating difficult philosophy with commonplace examples and popular culture, but with varying results and diminishing returns.

It's really 3 that McGowan can be praised for. Hegel feels impossible at first, like really and truly unapproachable. McGowan is an excellent guide who will open that first door for new readers. He does what all good introductions to difficult philosophy do, which is cut up the material, break it down, polarize and determine specifics so that the terrain becomes more navigable. This means he is inevitably doing damage to Hegel's actual work, oversimplifying, etc, but that's fine! Even when someone is wrong, getting a chance to become engaged with how they are wrong is a gift when the original work initially felt like gibberish. McGowan locates Hegel in the real world, and you won't feel afloat as you might reading Hegel himself or his many commentators. His commentary gives you some ground to stand on, even if you decide in the end to flee. McGowan's podcast and other writings were very helpful for me as I first tried to tackle Hegel for these very reasons, which makes me want to like this more, but I didn't really enjoy this after many months of tarrying with Hegel's work directly. Still, I would for sure recommend it to someone as a way to dip your toes in, get some background, become familiar with the concepts and some of the stakes involved.

[Tannishka Singh · Rating 4 out of 5]

In brief, McGowan's book, "Emancipation after Hegel" wants to bring the Hegelian contradiction as presented in Science of Logic to the forefront of any reading of Hegel. After all McGowan's Hegel is all about how being fails to coincide with itself, thus is self-divided and subjectivised in its insubstantiality. It is through contradiction that McGowan brings Hegel in line with the most modern theories of matter, thus the Hegel presented is almost materialist.

But what I want to focus on here is McGowan's critique of Marx which is related to his very Hegelian understanding of contradiction which Althusser criticised more than 50 years ago in his seminal essay, "Contradiction and Overdetermination".

McGowan reads Marx as a rightist deviation of Hegel especially because of Marx's statement that communism will bring an end to class antagonisms, which McGowan takes to mean that Marx is calling for a utopian society free of the very ontological inconsistency which Hegelian contradiction correctly indicates. Instead what Marx is saying is that one set of contradictions characterising class society will end without in any way bringing an end to the ontological inconsistency as such or rather as Badiou writes void in its motion is eternal, it is this which allows Marx to write that "prehistory will end and history will begin with communism". Thus, McGowan fails to understand Marx's great theoretical achievement where the contradiction is no longer the simple Hegelian contradiction as Althusser writes but is instead a complex contradiction which is overdetermined. Althusser:

"But, strictly speaking, it cannot be claimed that these contradictions and their fusion are merely the pure phenomena of the general contradiction. The ‘circumstances’ and ‘currents’ which achieve it are more than its phenomena pure and simple. They derive from the relations of production, which are, of course, one of the terms of the contradiction, but at the same time its conditions of existence; from the superstructures, instances which derive from it, but have their own consistency and effectivity from the international conjuncture itself, which intervenes as a determination with a specific role to play. This means that if the ‘differences’ that constitute each of the instances in play (manifested in the ‘accumulation’ discussed by Lenin) ‘merge’ into a real unity, they are not ‘dissipated’ as pure phenomena in the internal unity of a simple [Hegelian] contradiction. The unity they constitute in this ‘fusion’ into a revolutionary rupture, is constituted by their own essence and effectivity, by what they are, and according to the specific modalities of their action. In constituting this unity, they reconstitute and complete their basic animating unity, but at the same time they also bring out its nature: the ‘contradiction’ is inseparable from the total structure of the social body in which it is found, inseparable from its formal conditions of existence, and even from the instances it governs; it is radically affected by them, determining, but also determined in one and the same movement, and determined by the various levels and instances of the social formation it animates; it might be called over-determined in its principle.

I am not particularly taken by this term overdetermination (borrowed from other disciplines), but I shall use it in the absence of anything better, both as an index and as a problem, and also because it enables us to see clearly why we are dealing with something quite different from the Hegelian contradiction."

https://www.marxists.org/reference/ar...

[Nick Denardi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Had to push through, but we did it.

Like a lot of academic/university press type releases, the title for this one is really the title of its potential sequel. It's all groundwork, setting the stage, reorienting the readers thought. Ironically, despite this title, Mcgowan only theorizes what others could potentially turn into "achieving". But he doesn't lie. He takes you through Hegel's history and his progression as a philosopher and connects all the dots that he believes others have missed, and I believe him.

At first I was drawn to Hegel because despite being referenced by nearly every philosopher since his own time, nobody ever really references him seriously. He always came across as some old christian dude who maybe had a good idea once. But by always mentioning him nonetheless, it was like academia (at least my experiences) was in some kind of denial they couldn't help but betray. And after this book, Hegel turns out to be the only atheist christian I've ever heard of.

In the end, Mcgowan shows that hegel realized one truth: everything is defined by (and therefore is equal to) what it isn't. A spoon has no meaning as a spoon when there are no knives, forks, plates or bowls. These things are exactly the negative shape of the spoon, they determine what it is. A spoon is precisely everything that it isn't, because only what it isn't can tell us what it is. Then Hegel pushes so deep into this kind of dialectical thinking so as to create a whole structure of thought and being, wherein freedom relies on us seeing contradiction within ourselves.

Can't say i fully understand it. But then again, some scholars have spent their whole lives studying Hegel only for a guy like Mcgowan to come along and spit on their graves, and I'm sure someone smarter than me has already penned a peer-reviewed but unread refutation buried in some online alleyway you can access for 50 bucks. I'm just glad I can say something about this guy (Hegel) who keeps popping up even 200 years after he put words to paper.

4/5 for being informational but if anyone else I know reads this I will personally give them 50 dollars. Cuz there's no way lol.

[Valentín Serrano García · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best available introduction to Hegel, surpassing even Zizek's "Less than nothing" (it is better to read McGowan's masterwork first).

McGowan impressive essay, blessed with clairvoyance, avoids the kind of misunderstandings and pitfalls easily found everywhere (Peter Singer's Introduction to Hegel, for instance).

The psychoanalytic insight wielded by McGowan links Freud, Lacan and Hegel in a palatable way. The last chapter, tackling Marx' rightish detour, worth a careful reading.

[Neo Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great prequel to Enjoyment Right and Left. If you're uncertain with where to jump into Hegel, this isn't a bad place. McGowan sacrifices rigor sometimes for clarity – here it isn't entirely unwarranted. I understand and sympathize with many of the points some of the other (more negative) reviews have made. All in all though, it's hard for me to disagree with the core points that animate this book – it shows that one needn't be esoteric to have a good reading of Hegel.

[Tahar Allouche · Rating 4 out of 5]

Could be more succint.

[Salvador Ramírez · Rating 4 out of 5]

El libro de Todd McGowan es una explicación general de la filosofía de Hegel, partiendo de la relectura que ha hecho Žižek, que a su vez utiliza el psicoanálisis. McGowan utiliza para su lectura de Hegel a Freud, pero no a Lacan como sí lo hace Žižek. En este sentido, esta interpretación es diferente a la de otros autores contemporaneos, a muchos de los cuales menciona a lo largo del libro o entabla algún dialogo con ellos.

El punto central de la filosofía de Hegel, para McGowan, es la contradicción, la cual además es de carácter ontológico, es decir, parte constitutiva de la realidad. El método dialectico que desarrollo Hegel esta encaminado a lidiar con la contradicción, por lo que se contrapone a otros tipos de posiciones políticas o filosofías que tienen como principio la no contradicción o la eliminación de la misma. De acuerdo con McGowan sólo comprendiendo la contradicción mediante la razón (Vernunft) y aceptándola es posible avanzar en proyectos emancipatorios de izquierda, que no terminen en tragedia o den un giro a la izquierda.

En el libro se enfoca no sólo a explicar los aspectos básicos de Hegel, también responde a muchas críticas o mitos que han surgido alrededor de su trabajo filosófico, como el que apoyaba el autoritarismo, su filosofía se resume en tesis-antítesis y síntesis, etc. Esto lo acompaña con ejemplos contemporáneos, incluyendo algunos de la cultura popular al estilo de Žižek. Leer a Hegel es complicado por su estilo de escritura y su método de exposición, de ahí que este lleno de mal interpretaciones de su trabajo.

Está dividido en diez capítulos, con una introducción y una breve conclusión; los capítulos son cortos y con secciones cortas. Debido al tipo de estructura y escritura es de lectura ágil, lo cual deja de lado muchas explicaciones y contextualizaciones. Por ello, el libro constituye un buen compendio para comprender a Hegel, pero no un sustituto. Es decir, es necesario leer directamente a Hegel y discutir lo que escribe.

Una reseña más crítica del libro se puede leer en:

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/revi...

Y para una reseña que hace una síntesis de cada capítulo se puede consultar esta

https://thedangerousmaybe.medium.com/...

[Laurel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hegel said we must recognize that philosophy's task is to understand the world as it is and that philosophy cannot change the world. (The more I read philosophy and see how it expands my thinking, the more I think it can expand the possibilities of thoughts in and about the world.) McGowan's book starts out with an early premise, that Freud's psychoanalysis is demonstrative of Hegelian emancipation, an in road to understanding Hegel's tangled writing. Instructive chapters follow that explain Hegel's term 'contradiction' is found within us.

Emancipation is presented by McGowan within Hegel's time: the French and Haitian Revolutions and Christ's sacrifice. Central to Hegel's philosophy is FREEDOM (die Freiheit) and the progressive achievement of human self-consciousness, self-consciousness is simultaneously the realization of freedom -unlike animals our nature is not fixed and ‘determined’ because human beings determine themselves dependent upon the level of our self-understanding. Thus recognizing our ability to self-determine is a form of freedom and for Hegel, the achievement of self-consciousness and the achievement of freedom go hand-in-hand.

The ‘classical liberal’ concept of freedom (which Hegel critiques) rests upon the idea that the self has within it a kind of negativity, which allows it, in one fashion or another, to reject, deny, or otherwise separate itself from situations that confront it. This negative aspect of freedom, however, goes together with a positive aspect: the capacity not just to say ‘no’ to certain options, but to say ‘yes’ to others. In making positive choices, however, we always retain our ability to change our minds and to negate them. What is it, he asks, that determines the our choices in the first place? True freedom, for Hegel, consists in not having our options set for us by something (or someone) else. It involves our freely choosing or identifying ourselves with the conditions which make freedom possible.

[Harsh · Rating 2 out of 5]

it's a good introduction to Hegelian theory but I felt the author becomes too much of a apologist to Problems in hegel. The author seems too much scared of the rise of right wing in his world (trump and all), and tries to create a sanitized political framework that can emancipate us through embracing Hegel's contradiction as core. The author is stupid to make sustaining contradiction as the necessary framework to move forward in politics , because if we regnize contradiction as essential any dielectical movement itself isn't positive. Dielectics itself rests on misrepresentation of other position, history moves forward through contradiction precisely because we hope to solve contradiction which breeds another, not the other way where we want to move through contradiction while thinking it's the best state. The author is too scared to fail in so much as to justify status quo as the only point to sustain. By his logic people of gaza should sit on hand in hand without thinking about any possibility of freedom because their very freedom is defined through opression by Israeli state. Bad book, that's why film theorists shouldn't write about politics

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent introduction to Hegel. It begins by saying that he is the most misunderstood philosopher, not least due to his followers, both left and right. It says this because his followers failed to understand the importance of Christ to Hegel’s philosophy – not least Christ’s death and humiliation as the culmination of his life. It also says that Hegel’s philosophy is really one of love and that love needs to be understood as self-negation.

Hegel’s dialectic is essentially that of unresolvable contradiction. And this means that the characterisation of the dialectic into thesis, antithesis and synthesis, about the only thing most people know of Hegel, is both something he never said and a complete misunderstanding of what he meant. For Hegel, there could never be a synthesis, rather just a new contradiction at a higher level. He starts his philosophy by asserting the identity of being and nothingness – since pure being has no definite characteristics and so cannot be differentiated from nothingness, which also has no definite characteristics. Contradiction becomes central to Hegel’s dialectics since things are never self-complete, but always in a process of change, of coming into and going out of being. This is also true of concepts, which contain within themselves fundamental contradictions that force them to become self-identical with their opposites. A is never simply equal to A – but rather A always becomes not-A and so is insolvably contained within self-contradiction. This means that contradiction is not something that produces the illogical, but rather something that shows the interconnectedness of all things, processes and conceptualisations of the world.

The author says that Hegel would have been much more readable if he had lived after Freud, someone who never really made any use of Hegel’s philosophy at all, but who also came to very similar conclusions on the nature of our self-contradictory selves. Where our desires seem to us to be just about obtaining the object of our desire, but that this obtaining of our desired object never satisfies us. This is because desire isn’t about satisfying lack, but rather about trying to resolve a contradiction we are unconscious of, something buried in our sub-conscious and ultimately repressed and misconstrued. But for Hegel, love is a way out of this. In loving someone we stop being purely ourselves and become realised in our relationship with the other, with our loved one. This negation of the self is essential for any possibility of us becoming what we truly desire to be – completed in our love for the other and for the product of our union with that other – our children.

This is also why Hegel is so interested in Jesus. For God so loved the world that he sent his only son who died naked and humiliated on the cross for our sakes. This humiliation of God is essential, rather than trivial. It opens up the possibility for humanity to be in a relationship with God otherwise denied us. A god that is at once both human and divine, a god that is the realisation of the fundamental contradiction at the heart of human existence.

There is an interesting critique of phenomenology, or rather the 20th century phenomenologists, in this too. They sought to get rid of the concept by replacing it with a concerted focus upon experience. That by turning to ontology, they could overcome the metaphysics of epistemology. But while Hegel also wants to return to ontology, he knows that by ignoring the concept, you are not left with the concrete in a pure form, but rather with eclecticism – all of the contradictions, but with them hidden beneath the particulars of existence. This mass of particulars never reaches the level of the universal since it rejects any underlying concept to choose between the infinity of facts and concrete being. Theory allows us to choose between the infinity of concrete facts to see underlying patterns in existence – as contradictory as these always remain. The abstract is no more complete than the concrete, but it is within their contradictory dance that we are able to move towards a fuller understanding of the limitations of both. Rather than seeking a final synthesis, these contradictions move on to a higher level and more pressing and unresolvable contradictions too. The process is never complete since the universe is never complete. Contradiction is not confusion, but rather the ability to accept that only in acceptance of contradiction is the world understandable at all.

In the end Hegel’s philosophy is one of movement and of interrelatedness. Quality implies quantity, the abstract defines the concrete, the particular sets limits to the universal and in turn is limited by it too. This eternal dance refers back to Heraclitus, where you cannot stand in the same river twice – or even the first time, since change is all. Following this insight to its logical conclusion is the point of Hegel’s philosophy.

I know this review is too hard – but the book is better. He has more space and is therefore able to discuss these ideas, and others too that are essential to understanding Hegel, in more depth and also much more clearly than I have space to do here. Hegel’s interest in the Haitian Slave Revolution was also something I never knew about before, and the discussion of that in relation to his ideas of the slave and master contradiction is also a fascinating discussion on the nature of the universal at odds with Hegel’s sometimes racist undertones.

[E H · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a difficult book to review. McGowan isn’t tackling Hegel as Hegel directly, but moreso a rebuilt Hegel based on Psychoanalysis, Marx etc. So it is difficult for me to just say that the book isn’t discussing Hegel in a way Hegel wrote his philosophy, because the book itself isn’t trying to do this.

As an introductory book i give it 3/5 stars. It doesn’t serve as a good introduction to Hegel. The main point of critique is how he handles contradiction. McGowan seems to take Hegel’s understanding that everything is contradictory and takes it to an extreme, treating it almost like a deus ex machina whenever something needs to be explained away in Hegel. Hegel does think that all things are self contradicting, but even with this it doesn’t immediately explain everything, just because something contradicts itself doesn’t mean it is still correct. For instance, McGowan argues that “The law of non contradiction contradicts itself”, Hegel not only does not think this way, but he also makes this very point explicitly clear in the Doctrine of Concept in the Science of Logic.

Here’s Stanley Rosen’s explanation of how Hegel deals with contradiction:
“His system is consistent in the sense that it explains contradiction rather than eliminating it; that is, Hegel shows how A and not-A are consistent with one another at a higher level of development. This is not at all the same as the demonstration that if A is deducible from a set of axioms, then one cannot deduce not-A from the same set. It is rather the demonstration of the interdefinability of axioms” (The Idea of Hegel’s Science of Logic)
This does somewhat sound convoluted, so I will give a convoluted example to explain what he means here.
Imagine a 2 dimensional world, wherein there reside person A and person B. Person A and person B stumble upon a weird object. Personal A claims it to be a rectangle, whilst person B claims it to be a circle. The two accounts they give are contradictory. Now imagine you get to see both their accounts and see that both of them are in fact telling the truth about their experiences. The only way for this contradiction make sense is if the object they are looking at is both rectangular and circular. Thus you reach the conclusion that these two people actually saw a Cylinder, a 3 dimensional object, which is rectangular from one side and circular from the other.

In this sense the contradiction is explained away, rather than being eliminated and seen as wholly illogical. It is through mediation (in this case, the higher dimension) which allows the contradictions to keep existing.

How does this relate back to McGowan? He sees every contradiction as holding a mediator allowing it to exist. This is where Hegel is more nuanced. It isn’t enough to just point out contradiction where you see it, but also to find out why it can be explained away. Some contradictions don’t have a higher plane to be elevated to. Sometimes person A or person B are misremembering their experience, they did actually see the same thing but just don’t remember it. McGowan does not do this, in fact he rarely if ever actually comes to speaking of mediators and their role within contradiction, which is a shame as this is a key part of the dialectic. It is as if he takes aufheben as its first, negative, definition and forgets about the triple meaning of the word.

Beyond this major issue the book does actually introduce some Hegelian concepts fairly intuitively. The discussion of being and essence, Hegel’s critique of Kant, Hegel’s relation to religion, history etc. are all masterfully explained and it makes the fact that McGowan didn’t give a good explanation of contradiction all the more sad.

As an intro to the hegelian currents of today it gets a 5/5. No genuinely, if you want to understand what Žižek, Dolar, Zupanćić, Badiou even are talking about when they speak of Hegel this is *the* book for that. McGowan is somewhat like the more PC friendly Žižek, in that he does reference pop culture on every other page to explain some concept but he doesn’t do the standard dark Žižekian twist of saying some insane thing immediately after (In his latest book Žižek in a chapter on ChatGPT devoted an entire page of apologia to himself saying the N-Word). It goes into great detail on how and why it is linked to Freud and Lacan, how Hegel can be interpreted as a materialist, how hegelian freedom can be preserved without keeping religion and other parts of his philosophy etc. etc.

Overall it is an interesting read and one of the better beginner books on Hegel today.

[Simon Gros · Rating 1 out of 5]

Todd McGowan and Douglas Lain: "Ukraine could not be invaded, were it not invadable"

Douglas Lain, a self-proclaimed American “Leftist” hosts a YouTube channel officially dedicated to the study of, among other literary authors, the main philosopher of German classical philosophy, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

As Lain runs a show there, he recently invited on the show a fellow American Hegelian academic Todd McGowan, the author of a recent publication on Hegel titled Emancipation After Hegel, published by the esteemed Columbia University Press.

Both of them are self-proclaimed “Leftists” of the “Marxian” variety (that is, even proclaiming to follow the thought of Karl Marx, or some other French Marxian authors of the 20th century like Guy Debord), so they decided to co-host a show together recently, as an introduction to which a very short clip was added at the very beginning of the video, with Todd McGowan laughing, joking and saying into the camera: "Ukraine couldn’t have been invaded, were it not “invadable”!".

As far as my limited knowledge of the situation regarding the invasion of Ukraine by Russia starting at the end of February 2022 goes, approximately 12 million civilians living within Ukraine have been either internally displaced due to war or had to flee to neighbouring countries, for example Poland, and have received refugee status.

These “YouTube Leftists”, who are backed and massively financed by prominent american academia like Columbian University, make their living off of proclaiming themselves as some kind of political leftists, with a progressive reading of Hegel, yet have absolutely no problem deriving jokes from the suffering of millions of people abroad.

As Donald Trump influenced politicians would say, “the war in Ukraine is none of our [United States] business, it’s an European problem, not ours“, so making jokes about wars that are happening abroad, as long as it’s not happening to them, seems to be fine to McGowan’s and Lain’s standards.

What these quasi-Leftist quasi-Hegelians like McGowan and Lain lack is the very basic philosophical self-reflexive gesture that any honest student is capable of making, that is, to make a basic inquiry about the nature of their own foolish appearance before they go on ridiculing others.

As they seem to endorse the isolationist Trumpian politics of making fun out of major wars abroad (a gesture which is in American ideological space even a far-right sign of political Libertarianism in the vain of Ayn Rand inspired ideologists and not even close to anything progressive), why don’t they simply follow this logic to its ideological conclusion and then also accept the isolationist Trumpian position where Trump at a certain time, while in power, said “warhead missiles should be launched by the United States into Mexico”, due to the similar migrant phenomena of the inflow of manual labourers crossing the border on the South of the country?

Or to put it in another way, while it might be true that Ukraine was technically invadable, the quasi-Hegelians like Todd McGowan and Douglas Lain forget, that so is the United States, which had such an immense fear of basic ordinary workers moving North across the border (who are simply trying to economically prosper) that the United States went into panic mode, put up a huge wall along its border (apparently trying to imitate the Great Wall of China) and erected a stupid "new modern wonder of civilization", further proving the immense stupidity and cowardliness of the ordinary American people for the entire globe to see.

[Brody Janzen · Rating 4 out of 5]

An important book that functions as a necessary corrective to the picture of Hegel that has predominated since the 20th century, as well as a lucid introduction to Hegel's thought for those unfamiliar with his work. McGowan's reading of Hegel is radical in the way it pushes the foundation of Hegel's ontology - contradiction - all the way to its end point, penetrating all the way to the traditionally hypostasized elements of Geist, Reason, etc. Instead of viewing contradiction as a condition that must be overcome through successive syntheses (what McGowan sees as Marx's illustrative error), McGowan's psychoanalytical framework enables him to view contradiction as a condition that exists all the way down, and one that we must be reconciled to.

Developing Žižek's interpretation of Hegel in a straightforward and explanatory way that Žižek himself would not be capable of (and nor would we ever want him to be), Emancipation After Hegel forcefully argues that Freud is the missing piece that enables the correct understanding of Hegel's philosophy. In fact, McGowan suggests that Hegel's lack of access to psychoanalytical language explains the difficulties inherent in Hegel's use of language itself. The psychoanalytical view of the subject as non-self-identical, incomplete, and contradictory, combined with Hegel's assertion that substance is always subject, allows for a forcefully compelling reading of Hegel as a Freudian philosopher describing a reality of radical contradiction that must be accepted, not fought.

By redeeming precisely the parts of the Hegelian system most rejected by modern theorists on all sides of the political divide (The Philosophy of History, the State, Christianity, the monarchy, the totality, etc.) this book offers an extremely valuable perspective on what is truly radical in Hegel. Unfortunately, the moral universe that the book describes is scrubbed of all vestiges of radical hope. This is a Lacanian place where "no salvation is possible" (pg. 220), and the definition of success is "reconciliation with the necessity of failure" (pg. 215). Although McGowan's critique of Marx's naïve, substantialized view of communism and his warning against the possibility of atrocity opened up by a vision of a non-contradictory future are both necessary and important, the pessimistic and self-defeating politics described in this book are not especially appealing to me.

Emancipation After Hegel answers the question of what Žižek would look like without Marx, and to me it seems to be a bit of a step backwards. Regardless, the picture of Hegel here is unquestionably valuable and this brilliant book deserves to be read by anyone who is interested in Hegel in the 21st century.

[Attasit Sittidumrong · Rating 5 out of 5]

ตรงกันข้ามกับนักวิชาการหลายๆคนที่มักให้ความสำคัญกับงานอย่าง The History of Philosophy หรือ The Phenomenology of Spirit ผู้เขียนเสนอว่างานที่นำเสนอแก่นสารทางปรัชญาของเฮเกลได้ชัดเจนที่สุดคือ Science of Logic ซึ่งข้อเสนอสำคัญคือการยืนยันว่า contradiction หรือความขัดแย้งเป็นแก่นสารของโลกนี้ไม่เพียงแต่ในระดับของความคิด แต่ยังรวมไปถึงในระดับของการดำรงอยู่ อันหมายความต่อไปว่าทุกๆการดำรงอยู่ล้วนเป็นการดำรงอยู่บนความขัดแย้งภายในตนเองอย่างไม่มีข้อยกเว้น self-identity จึงเป็นสิ่งที่ไม่จริง เพราะทุกๆ identity คือการดำรงอยู่บนความแตกต่างที่ตัวมันเองแตกต่างไปจากสิ่งที่ไม่ใช่ตัวมัน ในเราจึงมีสิ่งที่ไม่ใช่ตัวเราเสมอ เช่นเดียวกับพระผู้เป็นเจ้าเองที่เป็น infinite แต่ยังมี finitude ผ่านความตายของพระคริสต์ ซึ่งทั้งหมดทั้งปวงได้นำมาสู่สัจพจน์ใหม่ทางตรรกะที่ว่า a=-a หาใช่ a=a ตามหลัก noncontradiction ที่นักปรัชญาก่อนหน้าเฮเกลเสนอกัน

บนวิธีคิดที่ชี้ให้เห็นว่าทุกสิ่งทุกอย่างล้วนมีความขัดแย้งภายในโดยปราศจากข้อยกเว้น ทำให้เสรีภาพกลายเป็นเงื่อนไขตั้งต้นของทุกๆการดำรงอยู่ เพราะเสรีภาพสำหรับเฮเกลคือการดำรงอยู่อย่างเสรีโดยไม่ตกอยู่ภายใต้กำกับของอำนาจใดๆ เพราะภายใต้หลักการที่ว่าทุกสิ่งทุกอย่างล้วนมีความขัดแย้งดำรงอยู่ภายในนั้น ย่อมทำลายความชอบธรรมของอำนาจปกครองใดๆก็ตาม ด้วยเหตุที่การดำรงอยู่ของความชอบด้วยอำนาจหรือ authority นี้เป็นการดำรงอยู่บนข้ออ้างของความเหนือกว่า แต่เนื่องจากทุกสิ่งทุกอย่างต่างก็ไม่สามารถหลีกพ้นจากกฏของความขัดแย้งภายใน จึงไม่มีอะไรเหนือกว่าอะไร และย่อมทำให้เสรีภาพกลายเป็นฐานตั้งต้นในระดับภววิทยาของทุกๆสรรพสิ่ง รวมไปถึงการดำรงอยู่ของมนุษย์เอง

ดังนั้น เป้าหมายทางการเมืองของเฮเกลจึงเป็นเรื่องของการสถาปนาระเบียบเพื่อทำให้ความขัดแย้งภายในปรากฏอย่างชัดเจน ไม่ใช่เพื่อทำลายความขัดแย้งภายในดังกล่าว (ซึ่งไม่มีทางทำได้) แต่เพื่อให้ตระหนักและสามารถดำรงอยู่กับความขัดแย้งนี้ได้ อันจะนำไปสู่การยอมรับเสรีภาพบนหลักการที่ว่าไม่มีอะไรอยู่เหนือกว่าอะไรทั้งสิ้น (และดังนั้นจึงไม่มีอะไรอยู่ต่ำไปกว่าอะไรด้วย) ปัญหาทางการเมืองที่เกิดขึ้นในทุกวันนี้ไม่ใช่เพราะการเกิดขึ้นของความขัดแย้ง แต่เป็นเพราะการปฏิเสธความขัดแย้งด้วยความคิดที่ว่าตนสามารถทำลายความขัดแย้งเหล่านั้นต่างหาก ด้วยเหตุนี้ การปลดแอกหรือ emancipation สำหรับเฮเกลจึงไม่ใช่เรื่องของการก้าวข้ามความขัดแย้งภายในด้วยการเสนอโลกที่ปราศจากความขัดแย้ง แต่คือการสร้างรัฐอันแท้จริงที่เปิดให้ความขัดแย้งภายในสามารถเผยตัวและดำรงอยู่ควบคู่ไปกับความหลากหลายบนเสรีภาพที่ไม่สามารถลดทอนได้ (และด้วยเหตุนี้ ข้อเสนอที่ให้สร้างโลกคอมมิวนิสต์ซึ่งข้ามผ่านความขัดแย้งภายในของมาร์กจึงเป็นข้อเสนอที่ conservative มากเพราะเป็นข้อเสนอที่ไม่ยอมรับความแตกต่างกระทั่งความขัดแย้งภายใน ขณะที่ข้อเสนอของเฮเกลต่างหากที่ radical กว่า เพราะยอมรับว่าไม่มีอะไรที่สมบูรณ์ในตนเองและมุ่งเน้นให้มนุษย์ดำรงอยู่และพร้อมรับกับความขัดแย้งต่างๆอย่างมีสติ)

สนุก อ่านง่าย คนที่ไม่เคยอ่านเฮเกลควรอ่านเพื่อเข้าใจเฮเกล ส่วนคนที่อ่านและอินกับเฮเกลอยู่แล้ว ยิ่งต้องอ่าน

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

So I must start this review with saying that I hadn't even heard of Hegel or Kant or pretty much any philosopher until this book. I'm a complete noob when it comes to the philosophy world. It was only a few months ago when I joined a philosophy book club that I really began engaging with various philosophical ideas.

When it comes to this book, I can easily say it's not for any complete novice or beginner. I was a part of a book club that met weekly to discuss each chapter and that was incredibly helpful. It held me accountable to keep reading and digging in. I usually had to read the chapter twice and take notes as I went. However, I can say that it's definitely a book that you can read and re-read and get deeper insight with each reading.

With that said, the book and it's material isn't too far advance that you need any kind of philosophy degree or what have you. If you study it and do some of your own research, you can get a gist of what Todd McGowan is talking about. It was very interesting reading about Todd McGowan's interpretation of the dialectical method and how it isn't just a simple 3 step process, which is what I had initially been told. McGowan also seems to be a fan of psychoanalytic thought and Freudian themes definitely underpin his interpretation of Hegel. If you're not a fan of Freudian psychoanalysis, the ideas may be hard to digest and get behind; yet if you're open to them, I believe you can get some very interesting thoughts to ponder from the text.

The writing is good and easy to understand. Todd McGowan does his best to present complicated philosophical ideas in as simple of terms as possible. I enjoyed reading the book and got a lot out of it. But again, I also put a lot of work into understanding the ideas and that helped immensely. I would suggest someone know some of Immanuel Kant's work before you begin, as it will help in understanding what Hegel was trying to do in response to Kant. Overall, I found it to be a good book and an interesting experience.

[Christian M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hegel is commonly considered one of the most difficult to understand philosophers, if not the most difficult of all. With that in mind, the author does a decent job in explaining the Hegelian universe to the non-expert but interested reader. I can’t claim that I understood most of the discussion, but I am delighted to have received at least a few helpful and eye-opening insights. Apparently, even philosophers to this day disagree about what he meant. So I guess there is no easy interpretation. It makes me wonder why a genius like Hegel did not succeed in making himself understood more clearly. Generally, I have a suspicion also regarding this book, that it should be possible to express even difficult concepts and ideas more understandably.
The author does make an effort to increase comprehensibility by providing examples and occasionally adds a dose of good humor. Still, there could be more of both to open the ideas to a wider audience.
My main takeaway is that contradiction is an intrinsic and inevitable component of pretty much everything. Rather than engaging in impossible endeavors to eliminate such contradictions, as fundamentalists, fascists, and communists do, emancipation and freedom come from reconciliation with its inevitability. Contradiction is the driving force of history towards freedom, and the necessary precondition for our minds to operate.

[Iñigo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good compilation of Lacanian-Hegelianism, possibly because it barely references Lacan, and is instead grounded on Hegel's texts, some more convincing than others. It's good to have access to a much more straightforward and focused account than Žižek's usual style.

The advantage is that alongside clear and concise readings of particular texts/problems in Hegel, it also becomes really clear where the Lacanian account of the subject hits its limits (its abstract opposition to substance and nature, its a-historicity, its reduction to desire/drive, etc.)

This implicit Lacanianism is probably why its concluding political account is so unsatisfactory (is the universality of ontological contradiction really enough to flatten out all possible social structures into the same problem? Even if contradiction is absolute, aren't some social structures not preferable to others? Can immanent contradiction not constitute some strands of conservative ideology?)

[Kyrill · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can think of few books on Hegel that are more clear and helpful. It's amazing therefore that this book should also prove so sophisticated in saying new things about Hegel and confronting orthodoxy. Rather than offering a mish-mash of Hegel's texts as they relate to contemporary politics (as other texts do), McGowan weaves a coherent and persuasive thesis. Approach this book open-minded: Marx does not come out well here and McGowan is intentionally recovering what has been left behind as "right" Hegelianism with all its implications for our modern liberal order. Nonetheless, as an activist, I feel like this book really does offer important lessons for the left across the world.

An early digression into Freud and Lacan nearly lost me but it was only brief and fully justified.

[Mark Crouch · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wanted a book that allowed me to wade into the pool of Hegel's dialectic without drowning and this was a great start. Like McGowan's other masterful work "Capitalism and Desire", there's much to ruminate over and plenty to return to. My favorite part is probably the final chapter. Of course, the build-up to everything so far, McGowan/Hegel illustrates the state as the ultimate beacon of freedom as it can sustain contradictions. It acts as a divider for the subject's private and public concerns. “The state forces the subject to recognize itself through the mediation of the state structure”. The obstacle to freedom is necessary for the subject's freedom to constitute itself!! Time to face the contradictions of modernity head on.

[Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating book that breaks down Hegel's philosophy in a manner that is much easier to understand than plowing through Hegel himself. This is the third book that I have read from McGowan and he has a way of being a thought-provoking read for me even when I'm not always sure I agree with him. When I think of McGowan's work that resonates with me I think of his ideas around desire, and I found the chapter which fuses Freud's insights of unconscious desire with Hegel's understanding of contradictions to be very illuminating. McGowan didn't fully win me over with his arguments about the emancipatory power of Hegel's thoughts but it's something I'll be chewing on for the days to come.

[Paul Ataua · Rating 4 out of 5]

We should imagine the parents who sacrifice themselves for their children are actually more satisfied than the children for whom they sacrifice.

McGowan celebrates the rereading of Hegel that is going on at present and tries to present a clear easy to understand rendering of a new approach to the thinker. It’s an interesting read and I must say that I agree with much of what is being said here, but I feel that while McGowan provides the reader with an easy to read and interesting book, quite a lot of the intricate nature of the ideas is lost. Enjoyed.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is definitely up there with McGowan's best work. I feel like I have a better grasp of Hegel's concepts, particularly the notions of the absolute, reason, and the dialectic. I also think it is a great book to read if you are interested in Zizek, Kant, and Marx.

Loved the chapter on Freud. It was very helpful in trying to understanding Hegel's terminology. If you liked this book, definitely check out Zizek's Sex and the Failed Absolute.