The Dash—The Other Side of Absolute Knowing

Abstract

An argument that what is usually dismissed as the “mystical shell” of Hegel's thought—the concept of absolute knowledge—is actually its most “rational kernel.” This book sets out from a counterintuitive premise: the “mystical shell” of Hegel's system proves to be its most “rational kernel.” Hegel's radicalism is located precisely at the point where his thought seems to regress most. Most current readings try to update Hegel's thought by pruning back his grandiose claims to “absolute knowing.” Comay and Ruda invert this deflationary gesture by inflating what seems to be most trivial: the absolute is grasped only in the minutiae of its most mundane appearances. Reading Hegel without presupposition, without eliminating anything in advance or making any decision about what is essential and what is inessential, what is living and what is dead, they explore his presentation of the absolute to the letter. The Dash is organized around a pair of seemingly innocuous details. Hegel punctuates strangely. He ends the Phenomenology of Spirit with a dash, and he begins the Science of Logic with a dash. This distinctive punctuation reveals an ambiguity at the heart of absolute knowing. The dash combines hesitation and acceleration. Its orientation is simultaneously retrospective and prospective. It both holds back and propels. It severs and connects. It demurs and insists. It interrupts and prolongs. It generates nonsequiturs and produces explanations. It leads in all directions: continuation, deviation, meaningless termination. This challenges every cliché about the Hegelian dialectic as a machine of uninterrupted teleological progress. The dialectical movement is, rather, structured by intermittency, interruption, hesitation, blockage, abruption, and random, unpredictable change—a rhythm that displays all the vicissitudes of the Freudian drive.

Resistant Form

“…A dash appears in the critical text of Wilson and Austin and Olson (2004). See also Comay and Ruda (2018). ting constriction of imprisonment -linguistic and sexual.…”

“…See also studies that have explored the formalist politics of punctuation, esp. Brody (2008), Comay and Ruda (2018), Szendy (2018), after Adorno (1990); see also Telò (2023b). 72 See chapter 4.…”

Freudian das Ding and the Origin of Kantian Categories

“…8 In other words, the failure to elucidate the content of epigenesis that is working within the conceptual confides of CPR forces us to see how this concept organises the movement of the Critique itself, the way it morphs between first and third one. Just like the fact that the Science of Logic has to enter at the moment of complete effacement of self-consciousness in Phenomenology of Spirit 9 , so too does the CPJ enter in order to account for the internal impasse of the first Critique. What does the CPJ bring to an understanding of our problem of the origin of categories?…”

Logical Time in Austen's Persuasion1

“…A dash, as Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda remind us, attests to "a pause in thought, a pause for thought, but also to a kind of short-circuiting or cancellation of thought," one that "induces a moment of essential uncertainty in reading." 22 With Austen, the novel has no sooner started to produce "gentlemen" than it measures them for completeness, and thus deficiency; that unspeakable deficiency acquires a mark of its own (i.e.,-), which immediately inaugurates a chain of meaningless repetitions (e.g., "a momentary glance,-a glance of brightness") that, at the macro-level, includes the scene itself in its gentleman-making powers, given the logical time of Charles's sick-room. But then the negation itself immediately repeats, to mark the distance between "you" and "even I."…”