Hegel and Traumatic Ground of the Universal History of Reason

Hegel is a founding philosopher of political modernity. His accounts of history, and as well political institutions of bourgeois culture and society, are critical models and strategies for engaging what he calls negation. Negation does not simply belong to the “not” of judgement, but derives more substantively from the negativity of the desire of the Other, which has meaning. Negativity as the origin of negation originates with the negative instance of the subject, who expels part of itself in order that it may come to be as being for itself and for the other. Hegel thus institutes the twofold ground of negation as precondition of logical thought. Drawing on Rebecca Comay’s Hegel and the French Revolution I show how negation and the self-justification of freedom necessarily intertwine across the Philosophy of Right and the Phenomenology of Spirit . I begin with a study of the “form” of freedom in Stephen Houlgate and Kevin Thompson. Hegel’s Reason entails the universalism of history, which is in turn inseparable from the universalism of its ethics. That is, Hegel treats political modernity as rooted in systematic foundations that are inherently incomplete. The normativity of social bonds, an apt conception of a more radical sociality, is understood as inherently incomplete.