First of all: why Hegel? On my view, at the present moment, all the major projects of modern philosophy and modern theory have simply dried up. They’re like a series of beached whales lying there. Look at them: Marxism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, analytic philosophy. As paradigms they’re simply unavailable. We feel that we cannot settle with any one of them. We feel that we have to, as it were, look across the board.

Now, within all this, when I say that philosophy, modern philosophy is either the avoidance or the appropriation of Hegel. If you read Derrida, or Levinas, or Deleuze, or Lyotard what you find them trying to do most of all is avoid Hegel, to get out of that shadow, to avoid whatever it is that Hegel means by the absolute, or by Spirit. Of Spirit is clearly pretending to think about Heidegger, but all the time thinking “How do I get away from this bastard, Hegel?” Deleuze’s Nietzsche book: Nietzsche never read Hegel, Nietzsche didn’t care about Hegel. But what does Deleuze do in his Nietzshe book, say: “Nietzsche’s a critique of dialectic.” Nietzsche never heard of dialectic! Nietzsche didn’t care about Hegel. And good for him.

So, one version, I mean again, Levinas, the face to face, the idea of the absolute other: it’s simply a critique of Hegel’s idea of recognition. (garbled)

Alternatively, some philosophies appropriate Hegel. Most obviously Marxism. Most obviously, obviously critical theory: Adorno, Habermas. Lacan. That’s why, I mean, why do you think Drucilla Cornell is working on Lacan? Because she’s an Hegelian with a guilty conscience. Right? So she has to work Lacan. (garbled) And that’s what that whole mini-course was about, right? The whole course was to show that Lacan was a good Hegelian.

Finally, we read Foucault as a philosopher. Why? Why read an historian as a philosopher? Well, Hegel is the philosopher who changed the rules of philosophy.

Up till the time of Hegel, philosophy was things like: what is the self? and then you make arguments. But then you pick up this book, all right? And at first, if you’re used to German idealism, it’s cranky, but it’s kind of vaguely recognizable as philosophy: it’s talking about the problem of knowledge. And then suddenly it’s talking about the struggle for life and death between a master and slave. And then it’s talking about this unhappy consciousness wandering through the world, a kind of mini story of Catholocism. And it gets worse. Suddenly, we’re reading about Antigone. Or the French revolution. Or Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew. What’s going on here? How can this be philosophy? How can this story of other texts be philosophy?

Well, my thesis about modern philosophy is a kind of good Harold Bloomian thesis. That modern philosophy is, as it were, a misprision—to use Bloom’s word—of Hegel. That in order to do modern philosophy they must misread Hegel. It seems to me that if we agree with the hypothesis that modern philosophy is a series of beached whales, then whatever we do—and I’m not claiming that Hegel has the answer—but whatever we do we cannot, as it were, avoid the moment of Hegel. We must, as it were, engage with this misprision, this avoidance, right? Because Bloom’s theory about literature, you know, is the thought that every writer misreads their predecessor in order to make room for themselves. You have to misread in order to write because the father, the law, is too great a weight, too great an anxiety—the anxiety of influence: unless I do something absolutely radical and drastic, I’m just going to be Dad again. No one wants to be their father. So, at least it seems to me that we can’t avoid Hegel.

Now, all I want to do in the first instance, and you’ll have to excuse me, I find it really hard to think and sit at the same time. My brain is in my ass and I need to get off of it. All I want to accomplish, and all we can really accomplish, in the next kind of two months, is to make this book accessible to you. We cannot do a detailed reading; we cannot figure out every transition, every argument. All I want to do is give a presentation of the text by looking at its basic structure, and above all to look at certain specific moments of the text. Because the book, as you will hear, is about particular forms of consciousness, to use Hegel’s phrase. Forms of consciousness are different fundamental ways of looking at the world. And Hegel presents a whole series, for reasons that we’ll come to. Different very fundamental ways of fundamental episteme. Right? Fundamental ways of looking at experience. And certain of these are absolutely fundamental to the whole project. So what I’m going to do is try to explain how the book works, and then explain, or look at in some detail, just a few of, as it were, the highlights, the coming attractions, as it were.

At the end of it, what I hope to accomplish is that you all have the book as a readable text. I’m not going to read all of it. We can’t. But you’ll be able to, as it were, open it up and know what’s going on, and why, and struggle through the particular things that are in it. All right? So the goal is an opening up of the text to make it legible. That’s the first project.

The second project, less modestly, is that I’ve got a reading of the text. I’ve got an agenda. And even people who love Hegel think that my Hegel is very weird. Although, I’m not the only person reading Hegel this way. There are one or two other drunks in bars (garbled) probablly reading Hegel this way. But I guess my hint is that I want to pull out the key themes from my reading of Hegel from Hegel’s reading of Antigone. So, for me, Antigone is, in a way, the center of the book. And the end of what is called the chapter on Spirit I see as the completion of the reading of Antigone. That’s my, as it were, addition to Hegel scholarship, if anyone cares about Hegel scholarship.

I’d say that my reading has, or is marked by, five fundamental predicates. First, for me the Phenomenology is about tragedy, is about a tragic understanding of human experience. The reading of Hegel up to the present has been as an apotheosis of modernity. You may say the divine comedy of modernity. So everyone reads the Phenomenology as a comedy in the Dantian sense. Right? No one thinks it’s funny. There’s no slapstick—a little bit of slapstick, but not much, all right? It’s not funny, but it’s often read as a comedy. Dick Bernstein in his book Beyond Subjectivism and Objectivism—something like that, asks at the end: Is the Phenomenology a comedy or a tragedy? He says everyone reads it as a comedy—maybe it’s a tragedy. One of the things I’ve been trying to do over the years is ask whether or not we can get a tragic reading of Phenomenology. And again, going back to the model of Greek tragedy. One of the outrageous claims I want to make…yeah, it’s outrageous…is the Greeks didn’t quite have a conception of tragedy. That tragedy only becomes possible with modernity. And that, furthermore…of course what lies behind all this, I started asking the question about ten years ago: Why do all the heavyweight German bores keep saying that in order to overcome the problem of modernity there must be a return to tragedy? Nietzsche, Adorno, Hegel in his Aesthetics. So I want to read the text as in some sense giving us a tragic self-understanding as modernists.

Secondly, I want to read the conception of action and self as a philosophy of transgression. Not closure. Everyone reads all this about the end of history: Fukuyama, you know, that we’re at the end of history. According to me, the Phenomenology is a philosophy of transgression. And again, Antigone is our model. She breaks the laws. All right? She’s a civil disobedient. As were Hegel’s two other great heroes, Jesus and Socrates. Models of ethical action, his herores, are people who are transgressive. So my quesiton is: Is that model of transgression, of which there’s a very technical Hegelian word: negativity. What happens to negativity? Again, my more technical way of putting the problem: is the notion of negativity or transgression preserved as part of the achievement of the Phenomenology? My answer is yes. So I want to claim that it’s a philosophy of transgression that preserves negativity.

Thirdly, again thinking about Antigone in this play—and it’s very hard to think about this in California and its sunshine—but I think of the Phenomenology as a text about mourning. Or as I said in the course outline, anamnestic solidarity. After all, what does Antigone have to do? Why does she break the law? Because she needs to mourn. She needs to grieve. And of course everyone knows that the entire Phenomenology is about memory. So my question is: Is the question of memory—as Hegel says, Absolute Knowledge is nothing but the whole kit and caboodle memorized and understood and grasped—Is the Phenomenology simply a massive work of mourning? Is the memory…when we separate what we think of as memory, historical memory, knowing history from the work of mourning? And the work of mourning would be the work of what I said in the outline, called anamnestic solidarity. Which is a kind of…the idea of our solidarity with the dead others of the past. Ok. Now. That’s the hardest argument for me to make, and you’ll, I don’t know, and that’s the bit that I’ve worked out the least satisfactorily, to my own satisfaction, but at least I want to raise it.

Fourthly, I want to say that the fundamental understanding of how things go according to the world of the Phenomenology—and here we lack adequate words—but I want to say that Phenomenology is a book about turning, or since that’s not a very happy word, a book about conversion, or a book about transfiguration. About the self as self-transfiguring, going through a series of conversions. And again there’s a technical Hegelian word for this, hence the word Erfahrung, experience. And the Phenomenology was supposed to be about the science of the experience of consciousness. That was its original subtitle. Title, actually. Its original title was The Science of the Experience of Consciousness. But again, all this about the closure of the Phenomenology, about its being this absolute at the end means that at the end there’s no more experience. Right? That’s what Fukuyama thinks. In a way, that’s what Kojeve thinks. That somehow people stop having experiences when we get to modernity. By “experience” I mean something like an experience is anything that changes your life. When you say, “Oh! Did I have an experience!” All right? Something happens to you. And your’re turned around by it. You suddenly see the world differently. Well, the Phenomenology is a series of such turnings, such experiences. And that’s what Hegel means by learning. That we learn through experience, by transformation. Does experience stop? Did it stop in 1807 when he wrote the book? That sounds to me crazy.
So that leads me to my last thought that the Phenomenology is about not knowing some big thing called the “absolute” Only people who are determined to misread the text, like Charles Taylor, would read it that way. The Phenomenology, I want to say, is about the disappointment of knowledge. That we, that knowledge, from Plato to Descartes to Kant…philosophical knowing promised so much. It promised to give us the world, and tell us what to do, and how to live. And the Phenomenology is about the failure of that dream. It is about a disappointment with knowledge. That despite all our knowing, it doesn’t tell us how we ought to live our lives. And that philosophy can’t deliver like that. So those are the elements of what are a heterodoxical reading of the Phenomenology.

And part of the reason that I’m trying to read the Phenomenology this way is it’s part of an attempt to renew the claims of first generation critical theory. That for me, and again bizarrely, there’s no gap at all between Hegel and Adorno. Not even an angel’s wing. And that Adorno knew that, but he didn’t want to tell anyone. It was too embarrassing. But, of course, Adorno also knew you just couldn’t repeat Hegel. He had to engage with his own time and see what “Hegelian” meant. So what I’m doing, this outline, is part of a trilogy of books that I’m finishing. I just published, or is coming out immanently, is a book on Habermas. And I just finished a book on Adorno. And I’m now working on this text on Hegel as part of the vast question whether critical theory’s possible. And the reason I’m interested in critical theory, and this is again just autobiographical, is that it seems to me that all the fundamental paradigms that we have when dealing with modernity divide into two. Namely, in the sense that I think there are two basic problems that we’re worried about. One is the problem of domination. And the problem of domination leads us to worry about the problem of justice. And hence we get all the classical discourses on justice: liberalism, Marxism, some feminism are really discourses about justice, how to avoid domination.

And secondly, there is the problem of nihilism. The problem of the world becoming disenchanted and meaningless. The idea that ethical norms and values no longer motivate us. That we barely care about them. Or, if we care about them, we can’t figure out why we should. That this perspective, which I take as the perspective of modernist art, above all. When I think about it, Beckett is my…Endgame…there’s a play in…later when I give the paper in Rhetoric, I’ll explain that Hedda Gabler works in the same way as Endgame. The problem of meaninglessness. And this is, of course, what most continental philosophy is about. Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze…I mean, libidinal materialism is just to day “don’t worry about it”—right? Desire’s going to take care of it all. The problem of meaning.

Now, my interest in critical theory is simply an interest in, it seems to be the only project that tries to take both problems seriously. That everyone else either, I mean, the Nietzscheans are brilliant on the question of meaning, but we know they have certain problems with the question of justice. To say that Heidegger didn’t care about justice would be an understatement. But he was serious about meaning. And therefore we have a hard time understanding our mixed responses to these things. So, I don’t know about you, but I read John Rawls and it’s boring OK, but it also strikes me as just. But of course, I think there’s something missing. And he doesn’t know that there’s a problem about justice meaning anything to anyone, caring about it. He just addresses himself to other good liberals who happen to go to Harvard, and walk around Harvard Square, and say “How are you? I’m liberal” “I’m liberal too” and everything’s OK. It doesn’t work that way. He avoids the difficulty of a modern world that eats meaning, that destroys meaning at an incredible rate that makes everything meaningless, including the discourses about meaning. They become part of the culture industry. That’s the project. I’m interested in seeing…and part of the way I’ll read Hegel is to try to ask whether we can think about how these two things are connected.

Again, I don’t know if it’s going to work. I’m interested in critical theory because I think we must think about these things simultaneously. So I can’t be a good liberal. I never could be a good liberal. I couldn’t be anyway, now. And I can’t be a good continental philosopher, a happy Nietzschean. Because I have a deep concern for problems of justice. I want to see how these questions are articulated—if they can be articulated, if. It’s a risk and a gamble. (garbled) OK, so, that’s the project. Make Hegel, read a book for you. To give a heterodoxical reading, which is supposed to be fun and challenging. And, as is already clear, I don’t expect anyone here to agree with me. It’s a hopeless idea, to expect agreement.