French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism (review)

It is no news that Hegelianism forms one of the centerpieces of recent French intellectual history. Since its relative wane in the 1970s and 1980s, Hegel's posthumous career to the West of the Rhine has been under considerable scrutiny, and questions such as what it meant, why it was so widespread, and how it transformed French thought have all become favorites of intellectual historians. Over the last two decades, Judith Butler, Vincent Descombes, Arkady Plotnitsky, Michael S. Roth, Michael Kelly, Gwendoline Jarczyk and Jean-Pierre Lacarriere have all concerned themselves with this legacy; other writers have spent more pages on these interpretations. Bruce Baugh's addition to this significant secondary corpus does away with the lion's share of the French Hegel in order to trace and argue for what he considers its foundation, namely the "Unhappy Consciousness" of the Phenomenology of the Spirit (2, 6). In a difficult but interesting operation, Baugh excises from this history thinkers and influences that don't fully abide by this position: exeunt without mention Eric Weil, Vladimir Jankelevich, and politically-inclined Hegelian Marxists of the 1960s like Axelos, Morin, and Debord. Exeunt with two references each Gabriel Marcel, Jacques Lacan, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Exit Jean Hyppolite, considered first in a five-page treatment of his relationship to Wahl, Koyré, and "pantragicism," and later compared to Sartre in two more pages. Exeunt also Alexandre Kojève and Emmanuel Levinas, referenced mainly for their influence, on Bataille & Sartre, and Derrida respectively. Exeunt finally, and most importantly, the French receptions of Hegelian humanism, the Master/Slave dialectic, the System, Hegel's philosophy of history, the much republished "Esthetique," and Hegel-inflected Marxism.

Given these absences and reductions, Baugh's book is in serious danger of being relegated to shelves used primarily for purposes of competitive academic trashing, especially because he is himself rather unfair toward competing accounts, granting them almost no credit and (unselfconsciously) implying that their prime interest is in comparing the adequacy of Hegelian interpretations (6). Readers will note that Baugh provides no more than an internalist reading of the tradition and implicitly dismisses the question why this most difficult of German thinkers became significant to academic philosophers and café readers alike in light of his near-obscurity in pre-1920s France and of his neo-hegelian and Heidegger-inflected rehabilitations in Germany. Yet Baugh's argument deserves serious critical attention, both because of the limitations he starts out with, and because of the criticism it provides against existing readings of the subject matter.

Baugh argues that the phenomenologically and anthropologically inflected reintroduction of Hegel in France during the 1920s and 1930s centered on the tragedy of existence as internal division and alienation from the world, as well as on a historical-ontological equation that humanises Time. Led in different ways by Jean Wahl, André Breton, and others during the late 1920s and the 1930s, this interpretation of the Phenomenology provided the ground for the ensuing (existential) appropriation in Bataille and Sartre. Through the work of Benjamin Fondane, la conscience malheureuse became individualistically inflected and acquired a certain character of ineluctable permanence (42-43, 49) that it would not lose in the following decades (5). Baugh resituates the classical attention to history, the Master/Slave dialectic, and desire, by arguing that "the emerging importance of Hegel as a philosopher of history . . . and of the connection between Hegelian and Marxian dialectics . . . was a re-interpretation, an attempt to overcome what were seen as the deficiencies of the earlier interpretation" of panlogicism and that the French Hegel of the Unhappy Consciousness reflected the success of "Hegel the philosopher of history and human existence" (17). With Bataille, the surrealists, and Sartre, this relationship between negation and internal division became directly entwined with questions of life and praxis (66-67). Sartre's existential anguish, decisionist voluntarism and striving for the domination and negation of the other provided the most systematic such appropriation. As...