Introduction: Reading Hegel

Abstract

Werner Hamacher raises the question of whether it is possible to read Hegel without catching and keeping and thus murdering and burying him. It is a question that resonates through the history of the reception and interpretation of Hegel’s thought from his most immediate successors to the present.² As many commentators have pointed out, Hegel’s work is open to being read in so many different ways that any given interpretation, however historically sensitive or philosophically sophisticated, can be accused of silencing (murdering, burying) other Hegels.³ The question of reading Hegel is at the heart of this book in a double sense. On the one hand, the book seeks to demonstrate how approaches to reading Hegel inspired by feminist and queer thought (of different kinds) generate vivifying rather than killing interpretations of Hegel’s work. On the other hand, the book is concerned with the value of reading Hegel from perspectives that take the philosophical significance of gender and sexuality seriously.⁴ The book will show that in the years since the publication of the last Anglophone edited collection of essays on Hegel and feminist thought, Feminist Interpretations of G. W. F. Hegel,⁵ the feminist interrogation of Hegel has moved beyond its initial predominant focus on the pros and cons of Hegel’s explicit treatment of women, sex, and gender in his texts. Contemporary feminist scholars are building on their philosophical insights into the meanings of sex, gender, and sexuality to illuminate Hegel’s philosophical method and central concepts, and drawing creatively on Hegel’s thought for feminist theory.

HEGEL: DEAD OR ALIVE?

But every exegesis of Hegel’s writings which tries to catch hold of him and keep him risks gripping his neck und closing around him like a rope. Hegel’s reader becomes his gallows, his sarcophagus: his reading becomes a sepulchre of stone on Hegel’s name. ¹