Hegel or Spinoza

Abstract

This book presents an English-language translation of the modern classic Hegel ou Spinoza. Published in French in 1979, it has been widely influential, particularly in the work of the philosophers Alain Badiou, Antonio Negri, and Gilles Deleuze. This book is a surgically precise interrogation of the points of misreading of Spinoza by Hegel. As is explained in this version, the necessity of Hegel’s misreading in the kernel of thought that is “indigestible” for Hegel, which makes the Spinozist system move in a way that Hegel cannot grasp. In doing so, this volume exposes the limited and situated truth of Hegel’s perspective-which reveals more about Hegel himself than about his object of analysis. Against Hegel’s characterization of Spinoza’s work as immobile, the book offers an alternative that upsets the accepted historical progression of philosophical knowledge. It finds in Spinoza an immanent philosophy that is not subordinated to the guarantee of an a priori truth.

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