The greatest living philosopher

books:


	• Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative Jean-Luc Nancy University of Minnesota Press, 2002 - 124 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

The greatest living philosopher

After the death of both Deleuze and Levinas in 1995, the mantle of "greatest living philosopher" presumably went to Jacques Derrida for a while. But Derrida has always refused to be a philosopher other than in the sense of not being a philosopher (which is also being a philosopher). So his cohort and quasi-follower Jean-Luc Nancy had to take the real philosophy from Derrida back to the question underlying all post-modern thought, namely how to deal with the empty space left behind by Heidegger's deconstruction of the tradition. With this little book, Nancy himself has become "the greatest living philosopher" - that is to say he has done to Hegel what Heidegger did to Nietzsche in the 1930s and 1940s: presented him as the key thinker of the break of modernity, and, unnoticeably perhaps, stepped beyond him. This book is indeed a marvel - one gets slightly dizzy reading it. Its intensity is at times (no: always) well-nigh unbearable. Nancy, like Heidegger with Nietzsche, takes a drill to the concepts of Hegel and allows them to shine in ways hitherto unthought(see the editorial review above, no need to repeat the details). In the end, this is the overturning of the boring old French Hegel of Kojeve and Hyppolite and the most exciting discovery in philosophical reading of another in sixty some years. I had always thought of Hegel as the great synthesizer. But Nancy's Hegel "returns" Hegel to pre-Socratic instability and shaky difference, where the restless thought-in-process constitutes the sense of the world, and philosophy is as alive as it ever was. A friend of mine says that Nancy reminds him of the color of the LED on alarm clocks: well, he's right, 'cause Jean-Luc Nancy is very much a phenomenon of a new morning. The owl is disoriented but it is all a marvel. Yes, I guess that is what you could say.

for more information click here

An intro to Hegel for our time

Kojeve's "Introduction to the Reading of Hegel" is a great work of philosophical interpretation and a great aid to understanding Hegel, but I believe that this work by Nancy now supersedes Kojeve in terms of unlocking Hegel's relevance for us living at the dawn of the 21st century.

This volume not only illuminates the roots of those such as Heidegger, Derrida, and Deleuze in Hegel (rewardingly illuminating their own work in turn), but it provides the best recapture of Hegel from his pessimistic right-wing interpreters.

Even on the basic level of helping clarify and bring to life Hegel's core modes of insight, this book carries the day. For instance, in the chapter called "Becoming", Nancy gives the easiest and yet most satisfying explanation of a particularly controversial moment in Hegel's thought - the presupposition of the absolute. The way Nancy explains this moment helped me to understand how a misunderstanding of this moment can lead to much confusion and difficulties in later moments.

for more information click here

At once an introduction to Hegel and a radically new vision of his thought, this remarkable work penetrates the entirety of the Hegelian field with brevity and precision, while compromising neither rigor nor depth. One of the most original interpreters of Hegel, Jean-Luc Nancy offers a portrait as startlingly unconventional as it is persuasive, and at the same time demonstrates its relevance to a very contemporary understanding of the political. Here Hegel appears not as the quintessential dispassionate synthesizer and totalizer, but as the inaugural thinker of the contemporary world-one whose thought is inseparable from anxiety and desire, as well as the concrete, the inconclusive, the singular. Under Nancy's scrutiny, no facet of Hegel's work remains untouched or unrevised: problems of aesthetics, affect, and history, as well as the implications of freedom, politics, and being-in-common. Engaging eleven judiciously chosen points essential to Hegel's sprawling system of thought-restlessness, becoming, penetration, logic, present, manifestation, trembling, sense, desire, freedom, and "we"-Nancy develops precise arguments for their philosophical importance for us today.

Nancy's Hegel is the thinker who foregrounds the original, irrepressible, and joyous embrace of the inevitable will to philosophize; he is the philosophical guide who negotiates between the two extremes of stupidity and madness along the path to meaning. In the face of the horror of history and despite the temptation of past-based solutions, this Hegel's uncompromising foothold in the real makes him our contemporary, a thinker for our time.

Jean-Luc Nancy is professor of philosophy at the University of Strasbourg. Among his many books are The Inoperative Community (1991), and The Sense of the World (1998), both published by the University of Minnesota Press.

Jason Smith and Steven Miller are doctoral candidates in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine.

for more information click here

hot or not? What's your opinion? Write a review and share your thoughts!

recommendations

My Hegel/Derrida Reading Project
Read Something Besides Hegel
For Readers of Hegel
Short and Brilliant

negative

The 3-hydroxy fatty acids as biomarkers for quantification and ...
AA Bronson: Negative Thoughts
Accentuate the Negative: Integers (Connected Mathematics Series)
An accident waiting to happen: a spatial approach to proactive ...
Accident prediction model for railway-highway interfaces [An article ...

search for books
hegel, negative, restlessness

Impressum / about us