By Étienne Balibar
In this last session of Hegel 13/13 for 2026, which I see as a “guest seminar” offered to me by Bernard Harcourt as a kind of prize awarded for a long series of contributions to his philosophical colloquium (from which I benefited immensely), I will not exactly address the question “Hegel and the Future” that had been announced in the initial program, or I will do it only obliquely. What I want to do is select, for a free-flowing commentary, a sample of Hegelian sentences, which notoriously enjoy a strategic place in the interpretation of the Hegelian oeuvre, or have become emblematic of the intimate link between a dialectical modality of inverting concepts and the orientation of these same concepts towards an expression of the Absolute. I hope to show that these Hegelian sentences are signalled with an intrinsic plasticity.[1] This does not only refer to the fact that, dialectically, “conceptual sentences” (where key categories are associated with a speculative proposition or presented in the form of a foundational assertion) change meaning as they are developed within successive steps of the system’s elaboration : more interestingly (in my view) it refers to the fact that, qua actions of writing (therefore also iterated actions of writing in different conjunctures, to borrow a Derridean trope), their meaning proves essentially unstable. This instability has two aspects: these Hegelian sentences are in search of their meaning, which is never completely determined, and this meaning becomes displaced, even inverted within the history of the system and beyond that history, in “post-Hegelian” developments which, in reality, exhibit virtualities of the system (as typically in Marx, who claimed to “reverse” the interpretation of Hegel, but not only). In my understanding, this phenomenon is ultimately rooted in the fact that, even in a dialectical modality (where, as we know, contrary to the “analytical” standards, the fixity of meaning is not imposed, or the plasticity is intrinsic), philosophical writing, as a material practice, always exceeds its intentionality. What is written escapes control, it disturbs the reasons why it was written, and sets in motion a process of “contra-diction”.
I select three privileged examples (or constellations of examples) which arise from my own experience of working with Hegel and his Marxian continuation, by reading and, so to speak, re-writing his sentences, uncovering their latent prerequisites and their ambivalent implications:
1. “What is rational is real; and what is real is rational”
This sentence is to be found, as a kind of axiom, in the second half of the Preface (Vorrede) of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1821), where he rejects the idea that philosophy (here essentially intended as practical philosophy, or philosophy of politics, morality and law) aims at constructing an “ideal” model of the ethical life. Therefore the “idea” is not to be associated with the “ideal” (in Platonic or pseudo-Platonic sense), but with the reality or actuality (or effectivity : Wirklichkeit), which is identical with rationality (Vernünftigkeit).
The sentence has obvious affinities with traditional “metaphysical principles” (Parmenides : “the same is thinking and being”), but becomes associated in Hegelianism (and Marxism) with an absolutization of historicity. I will read it in association with other gnomic formulas, such as “No individual can jump beyond the limits of his historical time”[2] (which Althusser declared to imply the impossibility of a “Hegelian concept of Politics”) and Marx’s highly problematic formula in the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy (1859): “Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve”.[3]
At stake in the plasticity of this axiom is therefore the ontological grounding of the dialectical reciprocity of historical change and political action, which constitutes their common “rationality”.
2. “I, that is We, and We, that is I”
This is the (imperfect) translation of the remarkable sentence to be found at the end of the introductory section of Chapter IV in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) (Ich, das Wir, und Wir, das Ich ist). Hegel writes it as an allegoric utterance, as if the “Spirit”, now emerging in its own right in the phenomenological development, is enunciating its own essence, to be realized in successive existential and historical “figures” (the first of which being the celebrated “Master and Servant” dialectic). It proves to form a guiding thread to understand the construction of the whole work, leading from an abstract (formal) principle of identity of the subject, such as asserted in the tradition of transcendental idealism (Kant, Fichte: I = I) to a concrete, self-sufficient notion of subjective-objective reflexivity (“The Self”, also known as “Absolute Knowledge”, which in fact means historicity). But “I, that is We, and We, that is I” is clearly a name for the community, where the individual and the collective immediately recognize each other. Therefore this enunciation will be haunting Marx’s evocations of the idea of “communism” (as a de-alienated community). Interpreting the plasticity of the formula leads to discussing the ambivalence of such ideas as “the end of history”, and the conflictual unity of “State” and “Society”.
3. The “negation of the negation”
Arguably the most typical expression of the idea of the dialectic (later presented as a “law”, officially inscribed in the Marxist canon, but also rejected by some “revisionists” of different orientation), this quasi-sentence (or nominal sentence), which is closely associated, on the one hand, with the idea of (absolute) negativity (or “the labour of the negative”) as driving force in the realization of the Idea, on the other hand with the idea of the dialectical overcoming (resolution, sublation) of contradictions (Aufhebung), has a very enigmatic distribution in Hegel’s works, which is what raises my interest focussed on the question of writing. There are (crucial) works in which the negation of the negation is invoked (and discussed) in its own name: this is primarily the case of the Science of Logic (1812) where it is omnipresent (and also, as a consequence, in the shorter version provided by the Encyclopaedia (1817)). It also features in the Philosophy of Right (in the definition of “punishment”), and some lecture series (course on the philosophy of religion). The Phenomenology of Spirit remarkably avoids the “logical” formulation, but uses a “metaphor” : das Verschwinden des Verschwindens or “the Vanishing of the Vanishing”. Its problematic of the Christian revelation evokes the Lutheran motto of the “death of death” (Tod des Todes), associated with the notion of the “death of God”, hence suggests a theological origin of the dialectical Idea. To these variations I will add the famous Marxian definition (in Capital, Vol. One) of the communist revolution as “expropriation of expropriators” (also in fact a repetition of a messianic biblical formula) explicitly referred to the negation of the negation, transferred into the “materialist conception of history”.
The question that I leave open is whether “negation of the negation” is an univocal dialectical concept which becomes applied by Hegel and Marx to several specific (practical) problems in order to reduce their logic to the same universal schema, or an equivocal idea whose meaning and importance arises from a circulation between different contexts of writing, thus leaving room for interpretation and inverted uses.
Bibliography
Main sources
G.W.F. HEGEL: The Philosophy of Right (the Preface)
G.W.F. HEGEL: Lessons on the Philosophy of World History, Introduction (“Reason in History”) (extracts)
G.W.F. HEGEL: Phenomenology of Spirit, chapter IV (introduction); chapter V C. a. The Spiritual Kingdom of Animals and Deception; or the Crux of the Matter(die Sache selbst); chapter VII C : Revealed Religion.
G.W.F. HEGEL: Lessons on the Philosophy of Religion (section on the “perfect religion”)
Karl MARX : The Communist Manifesto (with Friedrich ENGELS)
Karl MARX: Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (preface)
Karl MARX: Capital, Volume One, Chapter 32: Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation
Additional sources
Etienne BALIBAR: CITIZEN SUBJECT AND OTHER ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Trans. Steven Miller (Fordham University Press), Chapter 5: Ich, das Wir, und Wir, das Ich ist: Spirit’s Dictum
Etienne BALIBAR: “Tod des Todes”: from the Philosophy of Religion to the Phenomenology,” Paper presented at the International Hegel-Conference, “Second Nature”, 14-17 June Stuttgart, Germany
Etienne BALIBAR: “The Expropriators are expropriated” (now published in Marx’s Capital after 150 Years. Critique and Alternative to Capitalism, Edited By Marcello Musto, 2019 by Routledge))
Watch the seminar with Étienne Balibar here.
Notes
[1] This is a nod to the interpretation proposed by Catherine Malabou in her beautiful The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic, trans. Lisabeth During (New York: Routledge, 2024).
[2] To be retrieved in the Introduction to the Lessons on the Philosophy of History (“Reason in History”).
[3] The complete text reads: “No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.
Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation”
