With Hegel Beyond Hegel

The essayistic nature of Fredric Jameson's short new book on G. W. F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit should not blind us to the fact that the book offers a systematic interpretation of the entire inner structure of Hegel's first masterpiece. Although The Hegel Variations comes from someone for whom reading Hegel is like eating daily bread, the book is readable as an introduction to Hegel while simultaneously providing precise interpretive hints worthy of the greatest Hegel specialists. In this review, I limit myself to four variations of my own, to four interventions into the book's key topics: Hegel and the critique of capitalism, the circle of positing presuppositions, Understanding and Reason, and the eventual limits of Hegel. Of course, the critical nature of some of my remarks is based on my great admiration of Jameson's work and on a shared solidarity in our struggle for the Hegelian legacy in Marxism. One should remember here the proverb that says only the highest peaks are struck by lightning.

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Jameson is right to draw attention to the fact that, "despite his familiarity with Adam Smith and emergent economic doctrine, Hegel's conception of work and labor—I have specifically characterized it as a handicraft ideology—betrays no anticipation of the originalities of industrial production or the factory system"—in short, Hegel's analyses of work and production cannot be "transferred to the new industrial situation" (68). There is a series of interconnected reasons for this limitation, all grounded in the constraints of historical experience at Hegel's disposal. First, Hegel's notion of industrial revolution was the Adam Smith-type manufacture where the work process is still that of combined individuals using tools, and not yet the factory in which the machinery sets the rhythm and individual workers are reduced de facto to organs serving the machinery, to its appendices.

Second, Hegel could not yet imagine the way abstraction rules in developed capitalism: when Karl Marx describes the mad self-enhancing circulation of capital, whose solipsistic path of self-fecundation reaches its apogee in today's metareflexive speculations on futures, it is far too simplistic to claim that the specter of this self-engendering monster that pursues its path disregarding any human or environmental concern is an ideological abstraction, and that one should never forget that, behind this abstraction, are real people and natural objects on whose productive capacities and resources capital's circulation is based and on which it feeds like a gigantic parasite. The problem is that this "abstraction" is not only in our (financial speculator's) misperception of social reality, but that it is "real" in the precise sense of determining the structure of the very material social processes: the fate of whole strata of population and sometimes of entire countries can be decided by the solipsistic speculative dance of capital, which pursues its goal of profitability in a blessed indifference with regard to how its movement will affect social reality. Therein resides the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism, much more uncanny than the direct precapitalist socio-ideological violence: this violence is no longer attributable to concrete individuals and their "evil" intentions, but is purely "objective," systemic, anonymous. Here we encounter the Lacanian difference between reality and the Real: reality is the social reality of the actual people involved in interaction and in the productive processes, whereas the Real is the inexorable "abstract" spectral logic of capital that determines what occurs in social reality. This gap is palpable in the way the economic situation of a country is considered to be good and stable by the international financial experts even when the large majority of people are living worse than before. Reality doesn't matter; what matters is the situation of capital. . . . And, again, is this not more true today than ever? Do phenomena usually designated as those of virtual capitalism (future trades and similar abstract financial speculations) not point toward the reign of real abstraction at its purest and...