The Empire Never Ended: Hegel, Postmodernism and Comedy

This paper argues that Hegel’s account of modernity is already an account of postmodernity, according to Fredric Jameson’s definition of the cultural logic of globalized capitalism. First, Hegel’s account of the problematic of modernity will be sought in the Phenomenology of Spirit by considering the constellation of Athens, Rome and Christianity along with Hegel’s contrast between tragedy and comedy in the “Religion” chapter, in order to present a philosophical account of a concrete problem connecting social, political and economic structures with their own self-representations. The core problematic will become instantiated in the legal figure of the “person” and the social world-structure of “empire”, associated with both Roman legality and comedy. It will be argued that Hegel’s socio-historical relevance today hinges on drawing a connection between Jameson’s periodization of Realism-Modernism-Postmodernism and Hegel’s aesthetic cultural categories of Epic-Tragedy-Comedy, and not Greece-Rome- Christianity. On this basis, the Phenomenology of Spirit stands as Hegel’s own “cognitive map”, for which comedy designates a problematic extreme of a social regime of representation commensurate with the contemporary cultural logic of late and imperial capitalism.