The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps

6. Is there an Event in Hegel? Malabou, Plasticity, and “Perhaps”

is there an event in hegel? 117 s i x is there an event in hegel? Malabou, Plasticity, and “Perhaps” Where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather. —Luke 17:37 Hegel, Perhaps Let there be no mistake. I am following Hegel where he did not quite mean to lead, marching to a drum he did not quite beat, taking up a cause he did not quite advocate. I am proposing, as Heidegger would have said, to “repeat” Hegel, to repeat not what Hegel actually said, which has already been said by Hegel, but to repeat the possible in Hegel, remaining loyal to the possibilities Hegel opened up for us by being faithfully disloyal to Hegel. To repeat Hegel in a productive way is, of course, to repeat Hegel’s own prodigious ability to repeat his predecessors, above all Aristotle.1 I am feeling about in the dark for the “perhaps” in Hegel, and for the first sightings of a coming species of theologians, seeking thus the future of Hegel, the future in Hegel, to borrow the suggestive title and thematic of Catherine Malabou’s book on Hegel, which I will examine below. So I proceed by posing the question: Is there an event in Hegel? Is there—against all odds—the chance of the insistence of an event in Hegel? Does Hegel still have a chance? Is there is a true future (avenir), something truly to come, à venir, in the Absolute, in Hegel’s Absolute, in “Hegel”? I say “against all odds” because, ever since the merciless mockery launched by the magnificent Kierkegaardian pseudonyms, Hegel has been treated as the Absolute Professor, the maestro of Totalization, who has extinguished the event by absorbing it into the System, reducing the poor existing individual to a paragraph entry in the Encyclopedia, as Johannes Climacus constantly complains. But that makes a mockery of Hegel, rejoins Žižek, who regards it as a “scarecrow” Hegel, which means for me such a Hegel as will scare not only crows but the doves and snakes and sheep favored by Jesus. As I persist in insisting that everything depends upon the insistence of the event, my dialogue with Hegel will seek to find a place for the event in Hegel, a 118 theopoetics: the insistence of theology place for this little word “perhaps” in the Encyclopedia, and so to insinuate its humble grammatology of the event into the great halls of his Logic. In this chapter and the next, I continue to put myself at a distance from the Kantians and to expand upon the sense in which radical theology seeks the reinvention of the event in Hegel. I do this by turning to the work of Žižek and Catherine Malabou, who I judge are the two most interesting contemporary neo-Hegelians. Malabou rereads Hegel in reference to Aristotle with Heidegger and Derrida uppermost in her mind, precisely so as to pose the possibility of a Hegelian event. Slavoj Žižek, whom I will address in the next chapter, reads Hegel in reference to Lacan, resulting in a fierce and fearless negative dialectic, in the face of which I timidly inquire if Žižek is not himself afraid of one small word, perhaps. I pose the same point to John Milbank, Žižek’s partner in their ferocious dialogue, a veritable gigantomachia that pits the Christian Olympian Champion of Cosmos against the dark forces of a Lacanian Alcyoneus defending Chaos to the bitter end. The sheer noise of this combat will put the doves and snakes and all the surrounding wildlife to flight. In the end, I will argue, the insistence of the event in my Hegelianism will forever be a heresy for the Hegelians . In Hegel there is an alliance with the monsters of the old theology that would overwhelm a weak theology of “perhaps,” which consorts with monsters of a lesser sort, with events of a lesser god (ch. 7). I am doing all this in order to further the cause of a new species of theologians of “perhaps,” of the insistence of a new theology and to further confirm my loyalty to Martha’s world. All along I am trying to refine my idea of radical theology—learning how to think the insistence of God, which means learning how to give events a chance and learning how to say “perhaps”—as a theopoetics of “grace.” I am linking what theology calls grace with the chance of the event as the chance...