Central to Bataille’s critique of Hegel is his reading in ‘Hegel, Death, and Sacrifice’ of ‘negation’ and of ‘lordship and bondage’ in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Whereas Hegel invokes negation as inclusive of death, Bataille points out (following his teacher Kojeve) that negation in the dynamic of lordship and bondage must of necessity be representational rather than actual. Derrida, in ‘From Restricted to General Economy’ sees in Bataille’s perspective an undercutting of the overall Hegelian project consonant with his own ongoing deconstruction of Hegelian sublation. I argue that not only does Hegel fail to adequately pursue his own best advice to ‘tarry with the negative,’ but Bataille and Derrida’s critique misconstrues the relation between sublation and dialectic in Hegel’s work. I explicate Adorno’s ‘negative dialectic’ by way of alternative both to Hegelian speculative dialectic and to its Bataillean–Derridean deconstruction.
This paper situates the interpretation of Plato in its 2500-year trajectory toward a significant change in the mid-twentieth century, away from the attempt to establish Plato's metaphysical doctrines to a recognition of the intrinsic value of their literary-dramatic dialogue form. I discuss the lingering presence of doctrinal interpretation in the Nietzschean-Heideggerian tradition of Plato interpretation as it manifests in Derrida's reading of Plato's Phaedrus. I then give two examples of the transformative power of attention to the literary-dramatic structure of the dialogues in the work of two quite different but mutually confirming kinds of contemporary Plato interpretation, those by Catherine H. Zuckert and William Desmond, respectively. The Plato that emerges from their work confirms the growing recognition that the tradition of Platonism does not represent the thinking embodied in Plato's dialogues.
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