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A Hegel without logic or theology 0:27 Yes, I would like to raise—well, I asked myself this afternoon, thinking about this gathering in which I am very glad to take part. I asked myself the following question: how and why Jacques D'Hondt called himself and, above all, first felt himself to be "Hegelian," even though on many points he neither took into account nor took up for himself the manifest content—I do mean manifest—of Hegelianism.
1:19 And that is why, when you asked me for the title of these somewhat disjointed remarks, I told you: Jacques D'Hondt, Hegelian all the same, and above all Hegelian. What has always struck me about him is precisely that he constitutes a very original figure, almost unique among Hegelians. He is not a Hegelian like the others, not only in his discourse, but already in his style of life, in the way he presented himself, so to speak, among us.
2:04 And that he is truly a Hegelian apart—let's say, at the very least, a somewhat apart Hegelianizer—this holds both for the content he offers us, in the way he most privileged and most frequently addressed Hegel, and secondly for the very form, the very manner in which he spoke of Hegel in particular.
2:41 As for content, I could for example compare him to two of his friends, who stood politically at opposite ends. And whose Hegelianizing discourse was quite different. I take them, if you will, in this initial contrast with D'Hondt.
3:11 I will speak, on the one hand, of Bruaire, who taught at Paris IV. And I will also mention someone who taught at his own institution, in Poitiers, with whom he was very close as a friend. This person succeeded him as director of the Hegel-Marx Center, and he too, in the content he offered readers on the subject of Hegel, stood quite opposed to D'Hondt.
3:46 In Bruaire—and this is moreover the title of one of his theses, Logic and Religion—thought is grasped at its summit, so to speak, in Christian theology: the concept, logic, and theology. Planty-Bonjour was of the same order: the essential content of their reflection was, on the one hand, the logical foundation or basis of Hegelianism, and on the other, its crowning—at least in the presentation of Hegel—theological and speculative, since speculation is theology expressed in another language, but with the same content.
4:40 You don't find that in D'Hondt. What you find in him is what lies furthest from what was presented by Hegel as the absolute. The absolute in itself, the theological and speculative, versus the earthly absolute, the earthly divine—that is, the state properly so called. And besides, D'Hondt never wrote, systematically or in his own right, commentaries on Hegelian logic.
5:27 Within Hegelianism, he was only interested in what, in his eyes, far from being fixed, eternal, and so on, stable in principle, was moving, was mobile, and in particular, therefore, in history. So in D'Hondt one never finds the scholastic, logico-speculative Hegel, and what one finds instead is something else entirely.
Freedom of writing, rhetoric, and the Poitiers colloquia 6:11 Then in form—especially in form—D'Hondt did not present, in his works and books, great dogmatic dissertations, the kind one often encounters among Hegelianizers. They even overdo it with Hegel, and I plead guilty on that score myself, of course. You don't find that in D'Hondt, but rather very free, very agile reflections, narratives of the true, and not discourses filled with argumentation, proofs, and so on.
6:55 You find stimulating stimulations. It is writing that is lively, pleasant, and carried by a rhetoric that Jacques D'Hondt always took care over. He was someone who had been shaped by the education he received, which was dominated by what was still called at the time "the humanities."
7:25 And rhetoric was cultivated. The freedom that D'Hondt possessed was always accompanied, in his written production, his production in book form, by a very great respect for the forms and conventions of rhetoric, just as, more generally, in his academic life, his absolutely free tone was always inscribed within respect for the university institution.
8:08 I remember—well, I don't want to abuse your attention—I remember that during one of our first meetings, in the years 1969-70, we had met because we sat together on the agrégation jury, which had been, in '69—it had been difficult—chaired by the inspector general who oversaw both juries, since there was a jury for girls and a jury for boys: for the men's jury, Dagognet, and for the women's jury, D'Hondt.
8:47 So I had made D'Hondt's acquaintance—I had read his thesis, but I didn't really know him—and one evening we were walking along the Boulevard Saint-Michel. And since I was in the process of completing my doctoral work, and we had discussed it with Belaval, who was going to present this work, Belaval said to me, "Ah, I'd really like D'Hondt to be on the panel." So I said, "Ah, well, would you not agree to come judge my thesis?"
9:23 D'Hondt—you'd have been flabbergasted—said to me, "Ah, but is that how it's done now, the candidate himself forms his own jury? Ah, listen, we'll arrange things properly, I'll have Belaval write to us," and so on. You see, this detail, forms—and forms in written production is rhetoric. That was always there in D'Hondt.
9:53 So, freedom of form, yes—D'Hondt's books on Hegel don't resemble the books of most other Hegelians. But where D'Hondt truly excelled in this freedom of exposition was orally. I always told him he was the lecturer par excellence—the lecturer par excellence, I would say, orally, the absolute anti-Hegel.
10:32 The Poitiers colloquia—I want to evoke them because they were one of the great moments in the diffusion of Hegelianism in France. Hegel had been put on the agrégation philosophique syllabus for the first time in 1968. There had been Kojève before the war, but that was before a small circle. With Hegel on the agrégation, all candidates were now obliged to read him, and then came the creation, from the early 1970s—as we had discussed during that examination—of the Research Center on Hegel and on Marx in Poitiers, which for some thirty years was one of the great sites in Europe and in the world where research on Hegel and on Marx underwent a rather spectacular, exceptional development.
11:34 I very much regretted—Planty-Bonjour kept things going afterward, but then Poitiers changed its focus, and now there is no longer a research center, not even on German idealism. Well, the gatherings run by D'Hondt—he was the master of ceremonies, a master of ceremonies always extremely courteous and altogether friendly.
12:09 He would lament—he confided this to me—that at other colloquia, outside France for instance, debates took on the character of truly armored confrontations—I won't say Panzers, but well, armored confrontations—between Hegelians of every stripe. In Poitiers, it was never like that. There was a genuine philia, a genuine philosophical friendship. And that has been, for my part, one of the great and one of the good memories that have marked my academic life.
12:48 D'Hondt's originality lies in the content of his discourse and in the form of his interventions, among Hegelians—French Hegelians, but other Hegelians too. I know of no figure truly as original in this world of Hegelianizers and Hegelians as D'Hondt. He was not a Hegelian or Hegelianizer like the others.
Hegelianizing and Hegelian: from Marxist to Marxian 13:22 Does this mean he was not really a Hegelianizer, a poor Hegelianizer? I would like, of course, to examine the matter. I would say that D'Hondt was a Hegelianizer—I distinguish between the Hegelianizer and the Hegelian; the Hegelian, who may be a Hegelianizer, adheres for the most part to the Hegelian approach. The Hegelianizer can be an absolute anti-Hegelian.
13:57 Marx, who was a Hegelianizer his whole life—and I'll say in a moment in what sense Marx became increasingly Hegelian—Marx, then, a Hegelianizer his whole life, is practically an anti-Hegelian from the outset. As for D'Hondt, he was a Hegelianizer, not an anti-Hegelian, but one who became increasingly Hegelian.
14:31 If you will, D'Hondt's path took him, it seems to me—I'm schematizing—from a Marxist to a Marxian, and finally to a complete Hegelian, and not merely a partial one as he had first been. In a kind of progressive disenchantment, a progressive de-enthusiasm, if I may put it that way.
15:05 I mean by this that the moment at which the Hegelian dimension of the truth in D'Hondt, for D'Hondt, does not become truer—the portion of Hegelian that first inhabited, that was first lodged in D'Hondt, did not become more Hegelian in intensity. He had always been that.
15:35 But this Hegelian dimension, which did not become truer for him, ended up becoming the only true thing, or the only truth. In the end, all that was left to him—and he confided this to me often in his last years—was Hegel. How many times did he not say to me, in his last years, "All the same, we were lucky, both of us, to have studied Hegel and to have been Hegelians."
16:16 That is the sense in which I would retrace D'Hondt's path. First, then, a Hegelian but a Marxist, with a relation, in his eyes, of continuity between Hegel and Marx. One should, almost normally, one must almost normally, go from Hegel to Marx—this is, moreover, the title of one of his works published in the early '70s.
16:52 This is the period when D'Hondt thought that 1917 fulfilled 1789. The Hegelian Marxist, faced with the succession of political events, faced with the intellectual sclerosis of Marxism—despite events that stimulated, re-stimulated, such as the appearance of Lucien Sève's book on Marxism and the Theory of the Personality, for example—
17:30 So D'Hondt becomes a Hegelian who is no longer really a Marxist but remains Marxian. The Hegelian Marxist gives way, as history unfolds, to the Marxian—always, but it's the adjective that matters—that qualifies a Hegelian Marxian. And it is at this period that D'Hondt shows that Marx himself had been much more Hegelian—not merely Hegelianizing, taking Hegel into account while feeding off him only to criticize him—that he had become increasingly Hegelian in his very method.
Hegelian Marx and Hegel as what remains true 18:25 In an article in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale, published in 2001—I had edited that issue—D'Hondt wrote a text, "Marx and the Phenomenology of Spirit"—in 1907, sorry, "Marx and the Phenomenology of Spirit"—showing what? That certainly Marx had set the dialectic back on its feet, but, if I may put it this way—I'll develop this a little—he shows that this dialectic which Marx set back on its feet has feet that are set down by the head of that dialectic, namely capital in its completed form, which is an assertion of Marx's own.
19:35 the consequence always contends with its premises; this end of capital, capital acting in a way on a mode of finality—that is, on a Hegelian mode—repositions the premises it had presupposed; it repositions them with their true meaning; the presuppositions become positions; capital engenders itself out of its own end, it posits itself, it determines itself—which, from the point of view of the rhythm of the dialectic and the structure of the dialectic, is the strict Hegelian dialectic, and this Marxian Hegelian became
20:45 toward the end, in what he considered, in the end, what remained of the true, what remained positive—he came, toward the end, to consider that whatever remained positive, whatever remained positive for us, was, in the disaster of the left, what had ultimately been said by Hegel—to such a point that, and I certainly do not wish here to reproduce for my own part what was at the origin of the pantheism controversy at the end of the eighteenth century, when Jacobi wrote to Mendelssohn that Lessing, at the end of his life, had supposedly declared himself a Spinozist—that is, an atheist—I shall not go on
21:55 to reproduce, on a smaller scale, that kind of remark, but I heard D'Hondt, in his last months, when we met, say to me: "All the same, there's not much left, one is led to acknowledge"—God knows he had not rallied to the cause—"we're in a situation where one is compelled to recognize that there's hardly any political will left, except with Sarkozy." I certainly don't mean that D'Hondt had become a Sarkozist, but the course of history led him to make remarks of this kind, insofar as he was saddened by it all, and that is when he would say to me: we were lucky—ah yes, we were lucky—
23:05 to have worked on Hegel and to have lived with him. But this Hegel, in D'Hondt, although in the end he occupies the whole space of truth, and despite his limits—because D'Hondt understood well that one cannot return to the past—this Hegel is the same one who, for him, at the beginning, at his own home, was a Hegel who was not everything for him and was not the whole of Hegel, but who in the end, for him, was what remained of the true, and led him, a little in despair, to affirm himself as a Hegelian. So I would like, to finish, to evoke and answer the question: why and how, then, could he affirm himself as Hegelian? D'Hondt encounters
The true is never dogma: the imagination of the future 24:19 and grasps in Hegel—essentially and from the outset, and this must be recalled in this week that is historic for Hegelian-leaning publishing—D'Hondt encounters in Hegel the philosopher of living history, and Hegel thus grasped authorizes, so to speak, Jacques D'Hondt to call himself Hegelian. Here is why: for Hegel, in particular when he writes on history, the history of the world and the history of philosophy, and this is D'Hondt's leitmotif—the true, in every domain, is never dogma. The first part of that great book is titled precisely "Dogma and History," that is, dogma against history—and history, that is, the true, against dogma. For...
25:31 for Hegel, what expresses thought in its truth, and action in its truth, is the opposite of what is fixed, of what is static—it is the rupture that condenses everything that exists, condenses it with a negative sign, all the past, which thus totalizes everything that is by projecting itself toward the future, and in doing so finds a way to reconstruct, totalize, and thus be able to devour the past—since it has been well delimited and determined—thus what allows things to progress. In the end, what interests the historian of philosophy and the historian
26:42 of politics plain and simple is what he saw in Hegel: what interests him in the past and in the present is the power that will be, or that already is, that of the imagined future—what interests us, therefore, in the past and the present, is the future. I recall that when D'Hondt left the presidency of the Société française de philosophie, under circumstances—if I'm going on too long, do tell me—under rather sad circumstances, he had organized in '91 a debate on educational questions, something very close to his heart, between Derrida and myself. Well, Derrida is an old friend—actually I've always—Jackie, and so on—people who were seen as quite opposed.
27:52 It had gone very well, but there was an audience—up above there were at least 200 people in the Amphithéâtre Michelet—and the debate had grown very heated, and it happened—this was in '91, in spring '91, I was still in Lyon, I had come—this was a bit before, since he stepped down in the autumn of '91—and a fellow philosopher present in the audience dared to reproach D'Hondt for having chaired the session poorly, for having allowed such-and-such, etc. I found that quite deplorable, and I resolved, to make up for it, to invite, for my first session, my first time chairing a session, to invite as speaker D'Hondt himself. He came, and his subject was "The Imagination of the Future," because if you read and reread
29:02 that book, you will see that the question comes up often, in understanding and for the very understanding of the past and the present: the imagination of the future. Hegel distinguished three kinds of history: original history, that which is made and told by those who make it—statesmen who become their own historians, Caesar and so on—reflective history, critical history, the history of the eighteenth century, and finally philosophical history, conceptual history, which grasps and comprehends everything—the history Hegel strove to develop, in which one certainly hears philosophizing on history, but he always stresses one thing: this philosophizing history does not render obsolete reflective and critical history
30:12 and especially not original history, living history—and that is why the philosophizing history one finds under Jacques D'Hondt's pen is a history that is absolutely alive even as philosophizing; it is alive—the thought, when he takes up Hegel's thought again, he takes it up again as living—and that is why his great book on Hegel is a biography, it is the biography of Hegel. So, if you will, he opposes to a Hegel that would be reduced to the system, the figure of Hegel—the figure opposed to the system. What matters in a thinker, even the most systematic one, is not the system, the content, the materials—it is the philosophizing figure.
Portraits, double language, and Hegelian complicity 31:22 D'Hondt drew up—indeed he did this his whole life—sketched philosophical portraits, philosophical portraits that restore thoughts through portraits, and these portraits, coming from the man of debate, of dialogue, of conversation, are always paired or coupled portraits, of Hegel with other philosophers, but also with—I was going to say people who are not philosophers, which is foolish since every man, as soon as he thinks, is a philosopher—but with people who are not professional or technical philosophers. So we see two portraits: Hegel and Dom Deschamps, the Benedictine monk who was his compatriot
32:33 from Poitou, where Dom Deschamps applies himself—chiefly by pushing content into the background, which matters, of course, since philosophers are indeed revealed through it, but still, he relativizes the differentiating content in order to emphasize the connections and identities. In general, moreover, he tempers oppositions, as being always a bit practical: there are right-wing Hegelians, there are left-wing Hegelians, but even the right-wing Hegelians are somewhat left-wing too, because they do not simply affirm, they do not absolutize the fact in its brutality, being in its static aspect insofar as it is conservative, but rather...
33:44 There's no Hegelian right and left; when one does philosophy one is always somewhat on the left, which is what made it possible to practise this systematizing, this philia I spoke of earlier, and basically, even if we don't all agree on the manifest content of Hegel, we can still ultimately agree in saying that one must not take everything a thinker said literally, especially a thinker who was writing in an age when one had to be careful and wary — hence his theory, at the heart of his approach as a historian of philosophy, of the double language in Hegel. That is what allows him, even while admitting, even while not taking on for himself the whole content of Hegelianism, to say, very sincerely and in good faith, "Hegelian, we differed"
34:54 he and I, but we were in agreement at bottom, even if we didn't show it — we were, this was his term, accomplices, and he inscribed several books to me with this formula of our Hegelian complicity. This was a relationship D'Hondt loved very much — he had friends, he had comrades, but above all he loved accomplices, he loved secrets, etc.; he was interested in Freemasonry. So it was this philosophical stance that, and I'll finish here, allowed him to celebrate the reconciliation of reason
Voltairian common sense and speculative reason 36:06 speculative, theoretical, scholastic reason that is interested in content, and of the more naive spirit — but as a spirit that is always more or less critical — which must be celebrated when we speak of common sense. Common sense knows how to sort things out, knows how to recognize the negative in the positive, the positive in the negative, is not dogmatic; common sense is at bottom always in agreement with speculation. This agreement between common sense and rationality has marked all the great heroes of the history of philosophy — Descartes, inventor
37:17 of long chains of reasoning, but also, as such, of philosophical common sense as essential. D'Hondt finds this agreement, one that comes somewhat at the expense of the pontificating understanding, which fixes on a true it considers totally different from the false, on a false it considers totally different from the true, and which sometimes, of course too often, characterizes dogmatic thought, that double face of the 18th century. Common sense, on the contrary, agrees with philosophy, and there is a man whom Hegel praised even while speaking of Kant and Fichte and a few others — a thinker whom Hegel praised, a thinker
38:28 who was one of D'Hondt's master thinkers, a thinker often looked down upon, considered not to go very far after all — this thinker who brought wit to its sharpest point, who was a man of wit as a man of wit, just as Hegel was the thinker and man of spirit in its globality, in its totality. The one Hegel praises in Faith and Knowledge, having spoken of Kant, having spoken of Fichte and others, is the immense Voltaire, the immense
39:39 Voltaire — and it's true, I reread recently, because I'll need to give a lecture on the progress of reason, Voltaire's Essay on the Customs and the Spirit of Nations; I reread Condorcet's Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind; I reread Turgot's early texts on the meaning of history. Voltaire is still the greatest — the Essay on the Customs is a magnificent work; if you want to take one book on vacation, take that one, because, if you will, it's the joy of reading dispensed at every moment. D'Hondt wanted, thought, came to Hegel that way, not through the rediscovery
40:49 of antiquity — he had a totality, he was confirmed in his work on Hegel, in his adherence to Hegel, by the path that was his, the journey he always retraced through the great 18th-century French thinkers, and above all Voltaire, reread in Hegel and the French. There are two articles devoted to Hegel and Voltaire — they're magnificent. You see, the two senses of wit/spirit: the sense in which Voltaire defines it, namely through wordplay, ingenious reason, and the sense of spirit in the Hegelian sense of the term. The reconciliation of these two senses is, in D'Hondt's eyes, the agreement between Voltaire's common sense and Hegelian speculative reason. So then
41:59 as far as the interpretation of Hegel is concerned, I was in almost total disagreement with D'Hondt — we disagreed on almost everything, but I make my own, I make my own this watchword he in effect left us; my complicity with him makes me endorse his program — yes, read Hegel with a somewhat Voltairean spirit, and then read Voltaire considering that he allows, that he permits, a reading in a Hegelian spirit. I fully make this watchword my own, and I believe this is one of the ways in which D'Hondt's intervention in the French philosophical landscape, the landscape of the history of philosophy, the landscape of philosophy
43:09 modern philosophy, whose contribution expressed itself through the essential debate on Hegel and Marx, is not outdated. I think this intervention by D'Hondt was one to be celebrated; in any case, for my part I say I was very glad to be able to benefit from the encounters that bound me to him — very, very, very — not a resumption, how could I take up again my former research director's work, no, simply — I'll come back to the point on which you concluded, moreover, which you dealt with at the beginning — a certain relevance of the Hegel-Marx relation in D'Hondt, and elsewhere, and you said quite rightly that it was in the course of his work as a Hegel scholar that D'Hondt became more and more Hegelian, and you suggested
Althusser and the decoupling of Marx and Hegel 44:20 that one could say the same for Marx. I don't know whether we grasp here the stakes — the philosophical and political stakes — of these statements in the period that characterized them: it's more a decoupling of Marx and Hegel than an articulation of one by the other, on the other, whatever forms this could take. I'm thinking essentially here of Althusser, but not only — Althusser, with the violence we know — I'm speaking of the violence in the decoupling, I don't think I'm distorting Althusser's thought, we discussed this point, it was exactly that: all readers of Marx before me, Althusser says, went astray because they had a Hegelian reading of Marx — to sum up a bit the argument of Reading Capital, which is Althusser's pink book — except one, he says, Lenin. I take my Lenin, one of the rare political leaders and men of action who confronted Hegel's logic — there aren't 36,000 of them, you know, in history. I take my Lenin, who slogged through the Science of Logic when he had the leisure to do so — I take, if you will, the relation between leisure
Lenin as reader of the Science of Logic, and the return of Hegel 45:30 and theoretical work. Hegel liked to quote Aristotle's phrase — the first sociologist — who said that if mathematics developed first in Egypt, it's because there the caste of priests enjoyed leisure; and precisely Lenin, stuck in Switzerland, a forced leisure, exiled there by the powerful Tsarist police, takes the time — well, it's the occasion to immerse himself in this logic, having heard so much about it — so much so that Marx says, fine, there's a fantasmatic element in Hegel, one has to turn him upside down, but among the bourgeois there are still worse than him, the old man is not bad after all. So, if we looked closely at the evolution you described, of D'Hondt becoming more and more Hegelian as he Hegelianized, and of Marx, we see it in shorthand in this reading by Lenin of the Logic, where at first he's wary — as soon as he sees the word God, of course he's there with his idealist bladders and 'to God' — and as he progresses, it's a reading — it's a fascinating book, this reading of the Science of Logic by Lenin in the famous Philosophical Notebooks of Lenin — and in the margin
46:40 we increasingly see admiring, excellent remarks, and suddenly, as its climax, at the end, when we arrive — let's be serious now — at the heart of the speculative, at the most serious of what is serious in the Hegelian sense, that is, the passage on the absolute idea at the end of the Science of Logic — well, Lenin says outright, and he boxes it in his reading, this passage on the absolute idea is thoroughly remarkable, I quote the French translation, is thoroughly remarkable — this chapter on the absolute idea is the most idealist and at the same time the most realist — it's contradictory, sorry, I'm distorting it — the most idealist and at the same time the most materialist, says Lenin, it's contradictory but it's a fact. What a lesson in reading, all the same! So you see, one of the two is mistaken, between Althusser and Lenin — quickly said, minus times minus — there's a rather extraordinary logical game: one says everyone got it wrong because they read Marx while working with Hegel, except one, Lenin, and Lenin says everyone got it wrong, and Lenin adds that Plekhanov and Bukharin didn't understand Marx because they hadn't read Hegel's Logic, and one must read the whole of Hegel's Logic, I'm still quoting Lenin, to understand the first section of Capital. If I allowed myself
47:51 to dwell a little, forgive me, on this recap, it's because the stakes are considerable. It's no accident that we're here talking again about Hegel and Jacques D'Hondt. This discourse seeking to articulate Marx and Hegel was concealed for a long time, through the shameful 40 years, during the triumph of liberal-libertarian thought, to borrow Clouscard's phrase, and concealed by this dominant thought — and now we're coming back to reading it. I think Hegelian studies, correct me if I'm wrong, have never been so rich in the world, it seems to me, in their extent and their relevance, but they often remained confined to the academic world, and that wasn't the philosophers' fault. And now, suddenly, the public is seizing on the matter — I draw a connection to what Hegel would no doubt have done with the crisis we are living through. It's no accident — there's a return, isn't there, of Hamlet's father, of the ghost of the old mole. We thought we'd gotten rid of history, well, no, it's there. There, I'll hand the floor back to you, and I'll quote you on this point
