Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative by Jean-Luc Nancy
I made several attempts over a period of a few weeks to read this book as part of a return to Hegel, but it stubbornly resisted my efforts to get anything out of it.
This might have been the kind of stone I would have gladly (at least in a “type 2 fun” kind of way) have tried to squeeze water from as a younger man. Rorty writes somewhere about the pleasures of reading Derrida and being driven off to the library/archives to chase down yet another obscure meaning or cryptic allusion. (Incidentally, I think this is a backhanded compliment to Derrida, and Rorty does not quite give him his “due” as a serious philosopher, rather tending to paint him as a “mere” writer of literary-philosophical mysteries; also incidentally, I am not even really saying this book is like one of Derrida’s, it is much worse.) I spent many enjoyable hours in such pursuits, but that animation seems to have absconded after grad school, and I can’t say I miss it.
The book is overly dense, obscurantist even, and seems to be saying little. It probably doesn’t help that I am also reading Hegel’s Idealism by Robert Pippin, which is a serious effort to grapple with making sense of Hegel’s project (primarily in the Phenomenology) and engages significantly with a vast array of other scholars who have attempted to do so. It is also a serious effort to communicate something to the reader. The book is difficult but lucid; it is difficult because the material it is working through is difficult, and it aims at and frequently achieves clarity in the mind of the reader, in stark contrast to Nancy’s book, which seems to aim at aping Hegel’s turgid prose and frivolous terminology. Hegel had some brilliant insights but was a terrible writer, and should not be emulated.
[2026-09-20 edit] This was much too harsh, supercilious even. I still think it is not a good book.