This thesis takes up the challenge of Jacques Derrida's Glas from an Hegelian perspective and addresses the central question of Derrida's book: "quoi du reste [ ••• ] d'un Hegel?" - "what remain(s) of a Hegel?". Glas construes a Hegel whose system is 'reappropriative' of all alterity and Derrida's efforts are devoted to disclosing the elements of Hegel's system that are not only incapable of reappropriation but which are, for that reason, the system's condition of possibility. Each chapter of the thesis addresses the construction of these 'remain(s), with regard to Hegel's text. The essay considers Derrida's reconstruction of Hegel's conception of Sophocles' Antigone, of the absolute religion and the construal of the Jews, whilst it also addresses the 'general fetishism' that is the method of Glas and is paricularly evident in the portion of the text devoted to Genet. In response, the thesis examines the Hegel of deconstruction and counters this construal with a rereading of the Hegel texts from which the 'remain(s), are collected. The fundamental argument of the thesis is that Glas presupposes and confronts the Hegel-reading of Alexandre Kojeve: a 'reappropriative' Hegel whose system concludes with the selftransparency of the bourgeois subject as citizen of the modern state. The 'remain(s)' represent all that refuses to be subsumed by the law or 'concept' of this state. In parallel, the argument focuses upon Derrida's construal of Hegel's thought as the 'metaphysics of the proper' and the essay thereby conceives of 'differance' as the alienation that constitutes formal identity or 'propriety'. Thus, the inadmissable 'remain(s), supply the formally-universal state and citizen of Kojeve with the moment of 'difference' that it must suppress: the 'remain(s)' collude with the sphere of production and exchange, with civil society and the proprietor. In contrast to the Kojevean Hegel of Glas, the thesis shows that Hegel's thought is not the narrative justification of modern, positive, property law but the determination of the latter's fixed and abstract oppositions. The response to Glas considers the 'remain(s)' to be the moment of alienation that is constitutive of the modern, universal right of private appropriation. Derrida, incapable of thinking otherwise than according to abstract law renders that moment transcendental. Thus, the thesis depicts Hegel as confronting the one-sided conceptuality of Kojevean 'right' and the one-sided emphasis upon non-identity and intuition in Derridean differance. The thesis asserts that Hegel's 'absolute' and the notion of 'ethical life', far from being the justification of positive law, adumbrate the possibility of cognizing this law without imposing the abstract concept anew. In the name of precluding the domination of the concept, however, the 'remain(s), will simultaneously reassert positive law as 'unknowable' whilst maintaining the violence of the law's imposition and its undeterminable oppositions.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:359932 |
| Date | January 1993 |
| Creators | Speck, Simon John |
| Publisher | University of Warwick |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/55818/ |
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