Hegel and Spinoza ― Substance and Negativity

Gregor Moder’s Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity is a lively entry into current debates surrounding the issues raised by Hegel’s readings of Spinoza, from the Lacanians and Deleuzians to the Althusserians and Heideggerians.

Hegel and Spinoza have inspired generations of scholars and sparked two of the most influential philosophical traditions that persist in theoretical debates to this day. Just as German Idealism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries legitimated itself through its attempt to transcend the determinacy of Spinoza’s system by reserving within it a place for the freedom of the subject, so one may also say that the twentieth-century French materialism of Althusser, Deleuze, and others legitimated itself by deploying Spinoza as the champion of anti-Hegelian materialism. This alternative, or rather a mutual theoretical rejection, is perhaps nowhere quite as evident as in the controversies between contemporary Deleuzians and Lacanians.

Contemporary materialist philosophy is either Spinozist or Hegelian—it either abolishes the concepts of the subject and negation, arguing for pure affirmation, that is, the vitalistic production of differences, or it makes a case for the productiveness of concepts of the negative, nothingness, and death. Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity both traces the historical elements of the alternatives and explains contemporary discussions as its variation, persuasively demonstrating throughout that the best way to read Hegel and Spinoza is not in opposition or contrast, but together: as Hegel AND Spinoza. 

GREGOR MODER is an assistant professor on the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ljubljana.