The Event of a Reading: Hegel ‘with’ Derrida

Abstract

To question Hegel is always to acquiesce, reaffirm and reiterate Hegel. The question addressed to Hegel, the critical position stipulated against Hegel already justifies Hegel’s very system of philosophy which defines itself by the central affirmation we can read in the Preface of the Phenomenology of Spirit: ‘The power of Spirit is only as great as its expression, its depth only as deep as it dares to spread out and lose itself in its exposition’.¹ There is thus never for Hegel an obscure, hidden and transcendent meaning which is not already and always engaged in the process of its own revelation. In this sense, Hegel’s system of philosophy grasps and seizes the totality of all that is present by marking that all is always and already revealed in presence. Which means that the totality of meaning reveals itself wholly and entirely through the different moments of its development and deployment. Or again, differences are the modalities by which the unity and identity of meaning reveals itself in and as history. Hence, the capital problem we all encounter in reading Hegel is the problem of the ‘beginning’: where does one begin thinking meaning when meaning itself has already and always engaged itself in its own deployment by which every singular moment from which one can think is the expression of the totality of meaning? Or again, how does one enter into a philosophy when this very philosophy reveals the movement by which is expressed the recognition that one is already and always deploying itself within the revealed entirety of meaning? ²