Although an insurmountable abyss seems to separate Kant’s critical
philosophy from his great idealist successors (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel),
the basic coordinates which render Post-Kantian Idealism possible are
already clearly discernible in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The original
motivation for doing philosophy is a metaphysical one, to provide an
explanation of the totality of noumenal reality; as such, this motivation
is illusory, it prescribes an impossible task.1 This is why Kant’s explicit
motivation is a critique of all possible metaphysics (which is not yet
science). Kant’s endeavor thus necessarily comes after the fact of metaphysics:
in order for there to be a critique of metaphysics, there fi rst has
to be an original metaphysics; in order to denounce the metaphysical
‘transcendental illusion,’ this illusion fi rst has to occur. In this precise
sense, Kant was ‘the inventor of the philosophical history of philosophy’
2: there are necessary stages in the development of philosophy, i.e.,
one cannot directly get at truth, one cannot begin with it, philosophy necessarily
began with metaphysical illusions.3 Post-Kantian Idealists share
Kant’s preoccupation with transcendental illusion but argue that illusion
(appearance) is constitutive of the truth (being). This is what this whole
book is about.4
According to Post-Kantian Idealists, the path from illusion to its critical
denunciation is the very movement of philosophy, which means that the
MYTHOLOGY, MADNESS, AND LAUGHTER
2
successful (‘true’) philosophy is no longer defi ned by its truth-apt
discursive explanation (or representation) of the totality of being, but by
successfully accounting for illusions, i.e., by explaining not only why
illusions are illusions, but also why they are structurally necessary,
unavoidable, why they are not just accidents. The occurrence of illusions
is necessary for the eventual emergence of truth, an idea Fichte, Schelling,
and Hegel inherited from Kant.5 The ‘system’ of philosophy thus no
longer represents the alleged ontological structure of reality, but becomes
a complete system of all metaphysical statements. The proof of the
illusory nature of metaphysical propositions in the traditional sense
consists in an argument to the effect that they necessarily engender
antinomies (contradictory conclusions). Since metaphysics attempts to
avoid the very antimonies which emerge when we make our metaphysical
commitments downright explicit, the ‘system’ of critical philosophy
is the complete – and therefore self-contradictory, ‘antinomic’ – series of
metaphysical notions and propositions: ‘Only the one who can look
through the illusion of metaphysics can develop the most coherent, consistent
system of metaphysics, because the consistent system of metaphysics
is also contradictory’6 – that is to say, precisely, inconsistent.7
The critical ‘system’ amounts to a presentation (Darstellung) of the
systematic a priori structure of all possible/thinkable ‘errors’ in their
immanent necessity, thus preparing the ground for Hegel’s ‘presentation
of appearing knowledge (Darstellung des erscheinenden Wissens)’8: what we
get at the end is not the Truth that overcomes/sublates the preceding
illusions – the only truth is the inconsistent edifi ce of the logical interconnection
of all possible illusions . . . This shift from the representation
of metaphysical Truth to the truth of the shift from error to error is
exactly what Hegel presented in his Phenomenology (and, at a different
level, in his Logic). The only (but crucial) difference is that, for Kant, this
‘dialogic’ process of truth emerging as the critical denouncing of the
preceding illusion is restricted to the sphere of our knowledge, i.e. to
epistemology, and does not concern the noumenal reality which remains
external and indifferent to it, while, for Hegel, the proper locus of this
process is the Thing itself. Like Hegel, the later Fichte and Schelling
ultimately locate the necessary displacement of truth, the necessity of
error, in the noumenal itself.9 In other words, the relative occurs within
the absolute. The absolute is not distinguished from its contingent manifestations.
It loses the status of a substance underlying the illusory
INTRODUCTION
3
appearances and becomes the movement of a self-othering without
which the illusion of a substance could not take place. The traditional
hierarchy of substance and accident is thus completely inverted. The
accidents take over and dissolve substance into a misleading appearance.
In our view, the reason for this ontological overcoming of epistemological
dichotomies (appearances vs. the thing in itself; necessity vs.
freedom etc.) can indeed be motivated by the Post-Kantian insight that
the very mode of appearance occurs within the noumenal. If we oppose
the noumenal and the phenomenal in terms of an account of the
fi nitude of knowledge we blind ourselves to the fact that this opposition
ex hypothesi occurs within the noumenal itself. Otherwise put, the whole
domain of the representation of the world (call it mind, spirit, language,
consciousness, or whatever medium you prefer) needs to be understood
as an event within and of the world itself. Thought is not at all opposed to
being, it is rather being’s replication within itself.
In what, then, does the break between Kant and Post-Kantians
consist? Kant sets out with our cognitive capacities. The apparatus of our
cognitive capacities is affected by (noumenal) things and, through its
active synthesis, organizes affections into phenomenal reality. However,
once Kant arrives at the ontological result of his critique of knowledge
(the distinction between phenomenal reality and the noumenal world of
Things-in-themselves), ‘there can be no return to the self. There is no
plausible interpretation of the self as a member of one of the two worlds.’10
This is where practical reason enters the picture: the only way to return
from ontology back to the domain of the Self is freedom. Freedom unites
the two worlds, and it provides the ultimate maxim of the Self: ‘subordinate
everything to freedom.’11
Yet, at this point a gap between Kant and his followers is opened up.
For Kant, freedom is an ‘irrational,’ i.e. unexplainable ‘fact of reason,’ it
is simply and inexplicably given, something like the umbilical cord inexplicably
rooting our experience in the unknown noumenal reality. While
Kant would refuse to regard freedom as the fi rst theoretical principle out
of which one can develop a systematic notion of reality, Post-Kantian
Idealists from Fichte onwards transgress the limit constitutive of noumenal
freedom in Kant’s sense and endeavor to provide the systematic
account of freedom itself. Freedom’s self-explication assumes a different
shape. Freedom is no longer opposed to necessity, it does not remain a
transcendent postulate, but becomes an inherent feature of being as
MYTHOLOGY, MADNESS, AND LAUGHTER
4
such. For precisely this reason, Schelling in his Essay on Human Freedom
recommends a ‘higher realism’ of freedom:
It will always remain odd, however, that Kant, after having first distinguished
things-in-themselves from appearances only negatively
through their independence from time and later treating independence
from time and freedom as correlate concepts in the metaphysical
discussions of his Critique of Practical Reason, did not go further toward
the thought of transferring this only possible positive concept of the
in-itself also to things; thereby he would immediately have raised
himself to a higher standpoint of reflection and above the negativity
that is the character of his theoretical philosophy.12
The status of the limits of knowledge changes with German Idealism.
The epistemological fi nitude of reason which cannot legitimately be
transgressed without generating metaphysical nonsense for the Idealists
indicates the limitations of Kantian refl ection. They believe that Kant got
stuck half-way, whereas from a thoroughly Kantian perspective, his
idealist successors completely misunderstood his critical project and fell
back into pre-critical metaphysics or, worst even, mystical Schwärmerei.
Accordingly, there are mainly two versions of the passage from Kant to
German Idealism which respectively result from the unfortunate and
often even hostile dividing line within contemporary philosophy. Philosophers
who characterize themselves by belonging to the analytic tradition
(a term which, as a matter of fact, denotes at the most a family
resemblance of methods) tend to believe that Kant is the last traditional
philosopher who, at least partially, ‘makes sense.’ Until most recently,
analytic philosophers defi ned themselves by a deep hostility towards the
Post-Kantian turn of German philosophy and (in the wake of Moore and
Russell) regarded it as one of the greatest catastrophes, as a bunch of
undisciplined regressions into meaningless speculation and so forth. On
the other hand, there is a group of philosophers who deem the Post-
Kantian speculative-historical approach to philosophical thought the
highest achievement of philosophy which we have not yet even fully
understood. They believe that many of the central insights of German
Idealism still wait to be translated into contemporary philosophy.
However, the latter group of philosophers tends to neglect those features
of German Idealism which, at fi rst glance, do not appear to be translatable
into contemporary philosophy. Yet, we fi rmly believe that it is an
INTRODUCTION
5
important task of contemporary philosophy to create new possibilities of
expression out of an original approach to the problem of subjectivity in
German Idealism.
There are roughly speaking two perspectives on the turn from Kant
to Post-Kantian Idealism. (1) According to the fi rst approach, Kant
correctly claims that the gap of fi nitude only allows for a negative access
to the noumenal, while Hegel’s absolute idealism, to name one example,
dogmatically closes the Kantian gap and returns to pre-critical metaphysics.
(2) According to the second approach, Kant’s destruction of metaphysics
does not even go far enough, because it still maintains the
reference to the Thing-in-itself as an external, albeit inaccessible entity.
Seen from this vantage point, Hegel merely radicalizes Kant, by offering
a transition from a negative access to the Absolute to the Absolute itself
as negativity.
In this volume, we will defend a reading along the lines of (2). However,
we will not just offer another perspective of the transition from Kant to
Hegel. We will rather focus on some widely neglected features of Post-
Kantian Idealism which speak in favor of our overall thesis: German
Idealism was designed to effectuate a shift from epistemology to a new ontology
without simply regressing to pre-critical metaphysics. It locates the gap between
the alleged absolute (the thing in itself) and the relative (the phenomenal world)
within the absolute itself. It is a crucial duty of contemporary Post-Kantian
Idealism to make sense of this shift in order to contribute to the overcoming of
epistemology as prima philosophia.
If totality exists, then it necessarily remains incomplete if we continue
to exclude error from truth. Error, illusion, misunderstanding, negativity,
fi nitude, etc. are necessary preconditions for an adequate, nonobjectifi
ed understanding of the absolute as the opening up of a domain
within which determinate (fi nite) objects can appear.
As Slavoj Žižek argues, Hegel’s decisive move draws on the dialectical
insight that our incomplete knowledge of the thing turns into a positive
feature of the thing which (qua fi nite, determinate object) is in itself
incomplete and inconsistent. This is the Hegelian shift from the epistemological
obstacle to the positive ontological condition of appearance.
In other words, Hegel does not ‘re-ontologize’ the Kantian framework.
On the contrary, Kant’s philosophy needs to be properly ‘de- ontologized,’
insofar as it conceives the gap of fi nitude as merely epistemological,
insofar as he continues to presuppose (or postulate) the vision of a fully
MYTHOLOGY, MADNESS, AND LAUGHTER
6
constituted noumenal realm existing out there. The Post-Kantian destruction
of this potentially damaging remainder of ontology consists in transposing
the gap into the very texture of reality. In other words, Fichte’s,
Schelling’s, and Hegel’s move is not to ‘overcome’ the Kantian division,
but, rather, to assert it ‘as such,’ to drop the need for the additional
‘reconciliation’ of the opposites. Through a purely formal, parallactic
shift, Post-Kantian Idealism gains the insight that the refl ective positing
of the distinction constitutive of fi nitude already is the reconciliation.13
Kant’s failure lies thus not so much in his remaining within the confi nes
of fi nite oppositions, in his inability to reach the infi nite, but, on the
contrary, in his very longing for a transcendent domain beyond or behind
the realm of fi nite oppositions: Kant is not unable to reach the infi nite,
because there is no such ‘thing’ as the infi nite waiting to be discovered.
This is why Kantian refl ection always already inhabits the allegedly
transcendent realm of freedom. Our freedom consists in the ability to
draw the distinction constitutive of fi nitude.
To acquire a more precise insight into the uniqueness of Post-Kantian
Idealism, it is also possible to access it from the other end of history, that
is from the vantage point of Post-Hegelian anti-philosophy and its
criticism of the idea of a ‘mirror of nature’ (Rorty), i.e. of representationalism
as such. Post-Hegelian anti-representationalism in its various
disguises (deconstruction, post-structuralism, neo-pragmatism, and so
forth) seems to debunk the language of representation/appearance
altogether. Instead, it emphasizes the excess of the pre-conceptual productivity
of Being or nature over its representation: representation is
reduced to truth-apt discourse which is rooted in the productive ground
of what there really is. Whereas Hegelianism still seems to operate on a
transcendental level, apparently ascribing the power of world production
to an absolute subjectivity, Post-Hegelian anti-philosophy is characterized
by the introduction of a determination of self-determination that
cannot be dissolved into the movement of a self-othering of absolute
subjectivity. As Walter Schulz has argued in his infl uential book The
Completion of German Idealism in Schelling’s Late Philosophy, Post-Hegelian
anti-philosophy which already begins with the later Fichte and Schelling
defi nes itself as ‘mediated self-mediation (vermittelte Selbstvermittlung).’14
The subject is thrown into a process of self-mediation it ultimately
neither controls nor triggers. The subject, in other words, turns out to be
the result of an inversion which alienates the subject from its alleged
INTRODUCTION
7
capacity to transparently manage itself. The later Schelling refers to this
process in terms of an ‘ecstasy’ of the subject or, even more fundamentally,
as an ‘uni-versio,’ an inversion of the One.
If we regard the process that we postulate here or rather whose
possibility we indicated in general, this process appears to be a process
of inversion, that is to say, of an inversion of the One, of the preactual
Being, of the prototype of all existence, for that which is the
subject, –A, becomes the object, and that which is the object (+A),
becomes the subject. Hence, this process can be called ‘universio’
whose immediate result is the inverted One – Unum versum, whence
universe.15
To be sure, according to our view of Post-Kantian Idealism, Hegelian
dialectics too draws on inversion as the true motor of the dialectical
movement; recall the ‘inverted world’ of philosophy Hegel refers to in
the Phenomenology.16 Hegelian dialectics is precisely a movement of autodisplacement
which is not enacted by a pre-established absolute subjectivity
or, even more absurd, by some transcendent absolute subject.
The general thrust of our argument is that the alleged ‘Post-Hegelian’
turn of philosophy really takes place in the work of Fichte, Schelling, and
Hegel and it does so in a more refl ected manner than much of the selfdeclared
overcoming of Hegel in twentieth- century analytic and continental
philosophy.
In so-called post-structuralism, for example, the relation between the
two terms of a binary opposition (phenomenal/noumenal, subject/
object, etc.) is inverted: the presence (the space) divided and thereby
required by the opposition is denounced as the illusory result of a productive
process which can never be presented. The self-othering of
binary oppositions exhibited by the performance of deconstruction
generates an absence which is, however, not the absence of something
which antecedes the inversion of the opposition. In other words, poststructuralism
could object against our reading of German Idealism that it
still privileges one relatum of a binary opposition over the other in order
to defi ne an absolute immune to inversion. It could make the case that
we leave the original One untouched to the effect that it remains the
subject of a merely accidental uni-versio. Post-structuralism invokes an
account of the shift taking place in the inversion which might appear to
dispose of the absolute in an even more radical way than suggested by
MYTHOLOGY, MADNESS, AND LAUGHTER
8
Post-Kantian Idealism’s interpretation of the notion of the absolute in
terms of a self-othering activity.
However, we will argue against precisely this objection. The absolute
of the German Idealists is not some pre-existing totality or some absolute
subject creating the course of worldly events out of its unhampered
spontaneity. Such an interpretation of German Idealism would miss the
crucial shift from substance to subject. The subject Hegel has in mind is
an absolute negativity which can only constitute itself after the fact.
Without its manifestation, i.e. without the fi nite, it would be nothing.
The ‘absolute’ is, hence, nothing but the proper name of the belatedness
constitutive of any logical space as such: our conceptual abilities to refer
to something determinate in the world can only take place after the fact.
The fact is constituted by this ‘after,’ by the belatedness of the subject.
Let’s say that ‘ontological excess’ denotes the excess of productive
presence over its representation, the X which eludes the totalizationthrough-
representation. Once we accomplish the step towards the gap
within the space of productive presence itself, the excess becomes the
excess of representation which always already supplements productive
presence. A simple political reference can make this point clear: the
Master (a King, a Leader) at the center of a social body, the One who
totalizes it, is simultaneously the excess imposed on it from outside. The
struggle of the center of power against the marginal excesses threatening
its stability cannot ever obfuscate the fact, visible once we accomplish a
parallactic shift of our view, that the original excess is that of the central
One itself. As Reiner Schürmann would put it, all hegemonies as such
are broken.17 In Lacanian terms we can also say that the One is always
already ex-timate with regard to what it unifi es. The One totalizes the
fi eld it unifi es by way of ‘condensing’ in itself the very excess that threatens
this fi eld.
In other words, any totalizing gesture of completion derives its energy
from something which cannot be constituted by the very gesture itself.
The very intention of completion, of a fully determinate, all-encompassing
structure fails because the activity of constituting cannot itself be
constituted in the terms of the overall sphere of intelligibility which is
the result of the activity.
To illustrate this point, let us consider Italo Calvino’s ‘A King Listens.’18
In an anonymous kingdom, the royal palace becomes a giant ear and the
INTRODUCTION
9
king, obsessed and paralyzed by fears of rebellion, tries to hear every
sound that reverberates in his palace: footsteps of the servants, whispers
and conversations, fanfare trumpets at the raising of the fl ag, ceremonies,
sounds of the city at the outskirts of the palace, riots, the rumble of
rifl es, etc. He cannot see their source but is obsessed by interpreting their
meaning and the destiny they are predicting. This state of interpretive
paranoia only seems to halt when he hears something that completely
enchants him: through the window the wind brings a singing voice of a
woman, a voice of pure beauty, unique and irreplaceable. For the king it
is the sound of freedom: he steps out of the palace into the open space
and mingles there with the crowd . . . The fi rst thing to bear in mind
here is that this king is not the traditional monarch, but a modern totalitarian
tyrant: the traditional king doesn’t care about his environment, he
arrogantly ignores it and leaves the worry and care to prevent plot to his
ministers; it is the modern leader who is obsessed by plots. This is why
the perfect formula of Stalinism, of the system of endless paranoiac
hermeneutics is ‘to rule is to interpret.’ So when the king is seduced by
the singing voice of the woman pronouncing immediate life-pleasure,
this is obviously (although, unfortunately, not for Calvino himself) a
fantasy – precisely the fantasy of breaking out of the closed circle of representations
and of rejoining the pure outside of the innocent presence
of the feminine voice. However, the fantasy of the pure outside, the
fantasy of the original One anteceding its inversion or even perversion
by the symbolic order, is nothing but the excess of the self-mirroring
prison-house of representations. What this fantasy misses is the way this
innocent externality of the voice is itself already refl exively marked by
the mirror of interpretive representations. This is why one can imagine
what the story’s ending really is, what is missing in Calvino’s explicit
narrative: when the king exits the palace, following the voice, he is
immediately arrested: for the feminine voice was an instrument of the
plotters to lure him out of the safety of the guarded palace.
If one translates the moral of this story into the language of philosophy,
it becomes evident that the One, the master-signifi er which is
supposed to constitute the ‘divine gift’ of intelligibility, is not exempt
from the process of totalization. The obvious problem is that there are
various simulacra of the One, various totalizing opportunities which are
inherently destabilized because they are only maintained by the fantasy
MYTHOLOGY, MADNESS, AND LAUGHTER
10
of an original One. In other words, the Hegelian ‘true infi nite’ is the
infi nity generated by the self-relating of a totality, by the short-circuit
which makes a totality an element of itself (or, rather, which makes a
genus its own species), which makes re-presentation part of presence
itself. The One is included in the act of excluding it. It becomes the inclusion
of exclusion, i.e. the inversion of itself. This inversion occurs within
totality: fi rst, a paradoxical element (which is not a proper element of
the apparently all-encompassing set-structure in question) is designated
as transcendent and secondly this paradoxical element is drawn into
totality in an act of closure. The impossibility of reconciling transcendence
and closure motivates Hegel’s claim that totality is not complete, that it
constantly stands in need of its realization in fi nitude. The infi nite is not
always already established but turns out to be the result of an excess of
intelligibility.19
This structure can also be made apropos the properly dialectical notion
of abstraction: what makes Hegel’s ‘concrete universality’ infi nite is that
it includes ‘abstractions’ into concrete reality itself, as their immanent constituents.
For Hegel, the elementary move of philosophy with regard to
abstraction consists in abandoning the common-sense empiricist notion
of abstraction as a step away from the wealth of concrete empirical
reality with its irreducible multiplicity of features: life is green, concepts
are grey, they dissect and mortify concrete reality. (This commonsense
notion even has its pseudo-dialectical version, according to which
such ‘abstraction’ is a feature of mere Understanding, while ‘dialectics’
recuperates the wealth of reality.) Philosophical thought proper begins
when we become aware of how such a process of ‘abstraction’ is inherent in
reality itself: the tension between empirical reality and its ‘abstract’
notional determinations is immanent to reality, it is a feature of things
themselves. Therein resides the anti-nominalist accent of dialectical
thinking (just like the basic insight of Marx’s ‘critique of political economy’
is that the abstraction of the value of a commodity is its ‘objective’
constituent).
This brings us to the question: what is a dialectical self-deployment of
a notion? Imagine, as a starting point, our being caught in a complex and
confused empirical situation which we try to understand, to bring some
order into it. Since we never start from the zero-point of pure prenotional
experience, we begin with the double movement of directly
INTRODUCTION
11
applying the abstract-universal notions at our disposal to the situation.
We analyze it and compare its elements with our previous experience,
generalizing, formulating empirical universals. Sooner or later, we
become aware of inconsistencies in the notional schemes we employ to
understand the situation: something which should have been a subordinate
species seems to encompass and dominate the entire fi eld, different
classifi cations and categorizations clash, without us being able to decide
which one is ‘true,’ etc.
In what, then, resides Hegel’s uniqueness? Hegel’s thought stands
for the moment of passage between philosophy as Master discourse
(the philosophy of the One that totalizes the multiplicity) and antiphilosophy
(which asserts the Real that escapes the grasp of the One).
On the one hand, he clearly breaks with the metaphysical logic of counting-
for-One; on the other hand, he does not allow for any excess external
to the fi eld of notional representations. For Hegel, totalization-in-One
always fails, the One is always already in excess with regard to itself, it is
itself the subversion of what it purports to achieve, and it is this tension
internal to the One, this Two-ness which both makes the One one and
simultaneously dislocates it, it is this tension which is the movens of the
dialectical process. In other words, Hegel effectively denies that there is
a Real external to the network of notional representations (which is why
he is regularly misread as an absolute idealist in the sense of the selfenclosed
circle of the totality of the Notion). However, the Real does not
disappear here in the global self-relating play of symbolic representations:
it returns with a vengeance as the immanent gap or obstacle on
account of which representations cannot ever totalize themselves, on
account of which they are ‘non-All.’20
In our spontaneous mind-frame, we dismiss such inconsistencies as
signs of the defi ciency of our understanding: reality is much too rich and
complex for our abstract categories, we will never be able to deploy a
notional network able to capture its entire wealth . . . However, once we
develop a refi ned theoretical sense, we sooner or later notice something
strange and unexpected: it is not possible to clearly distinguish the inconsistencies
of our notion of an object from the inconsistencies which are
immanent to this object itself. The thing itself is inconsistent, full of
tensions, struggling between its different determinations, and the deployment
of these tensions, this struggle, is what makes it ‘alive.’ Take
MYTHOLOGY, MADNESS, AND LAUGHTER
12
a particular state: when it malfunctions, it is as if its particular (specifi c)
features are in tension with the universal idea of the state. Or take the
Cartesian cogito: the difference between me as a particular person
embedded in a particular life-world and myself as abstract subject is part
of my particular identity, since to act as abstract subject is a feature that
characterizes individuals in modern Western society. The notional reality
is not opposed to the empirical. It is not the case that we simply take in
an in itself consistent world to which we then apply a propositionally
structured system of beliefs. This idea itself is already the application
of a notional structure, one way of describing our position in the world,
what Gabriel in his chapter will call a ‘constitutive mythology’.
The transition from Kant to Hegel can be formulated as the passage
from the notion of a substantial Real to the purely formal Real. The formal
Real is the immanent gap within the coordinates of representation.
Another key fi gure of nineteenth-century philosophy, Schopenhauer,
also contributed to this transition in his interpretation of the noumenal
thing as will. The Kantian unknowable which escapes our cognitive
grasp turns out to be the ontological essence of cognition. Intentionality,
i.e. our reference to determinate objects in the world, is directed by the
will, by the noumenal itself, which objectifi es itself in our referring
to determinate objects. What happens in Hegel is that the Real is thoroughly
de-substantialized: it is not the transcendent X which resists
symbolic representations, but the immanent gap, rupture, inconsistency,
the ‘curvature’ of the space of representations itself.
One of the most prominent anti-Hegelian arguments reminds us of the
fact of the Post-Hegelian break: what even the most fanatical partisan of
Hegel apparently cannot deny is that something changed after Hegel, that
a new era of thought began which can no longer be accounted for in
Hegel’s own explication of absolute conceptual mediation; this rupture
occurs in different guises, from Schelling’s assertion of the abyss of prelogical
will (later vulgarized by Schopenhauer) and Kierkegaard’s
insistence on the uniqueness of faith and subjectivity, through Marx’s
assertion of actual socio-economic life-process, up to Freud’s notion of
‘death-drive’ as a repetition that persists beyond all dialectical mediation.
Something happened after Hegel, there is a division between before and
after, and while one can argue that Hegel already announces this break,
that he is the last of the idealist metaphysicians and the fi rst of the postmetaphysical
historicists, one cannot really be a Hegelian after this break.
INTRODUCTION
13
Hegelianism has lost its innocence forever. To act like a full Hegelian today
is the same as to write tonal music after the Schönberg revolution.
The predominant Hegelian strategy that is emerging as a reaction to
this scare-crow image of Hegel the Absolute Idealist, is the ‘defl ated’
image of Hegel freed of ontological-metaphysical commitments, reduced
to a general theory of discourse and to discourse’s constitutive normativity.
This approach is best exemplifi ed by so-called Pittsburgh Hegelians
(Brandom, McDowell): no wonder Habermas praises Brandom, since
Habermas also avoids directly approaching the ‘big’ ontological question
(‘are humans really a subspecies of animals, is Darwinism true?’), the
question of God or nature, of idealism or materialism. It would be easy
to prove that Habermas’s neo-Kantian avoidance of ontological commitment
is in itself necessarily ambiguous: while Habermasians treat
naturalism as the obscene secret not to be publicly admitted (‘of course
man developed from nature, of course Darwin was right . . .’), this
obscure secret is a lie, it covers up their deeply idealist form of thought
(the a priori transcendentals of communication which cannot be deduced
from natural being). The truth is hidden and at the same time manifested
in the form: while Habermasians secretly think they are really materialists,
the truth lies in the idealist form of their thinking. To put it provocatively,
Habermasians tend to be royalists in the republican form. They
reduce naturalism to a fruitful hypothesis which seems to be inevitable
given that contemporary discourse has committed itself to a scientifi c
world-picture. Yet, to be an actual naturalist is not to subscribe to necessary
fi ction, but to really believe in materialism. It is, in other words, not
enough to insist that Kant and Hegel have to teach us something about
the realm of normativity which takes place in the wider domain of the
realm of nature. It is, on the contrary, important to re-appropriate
German Idealism to a fuller extent. If discourse, representation, mind, or
thought in general cannot consistently be opposed to the substantial real
which is supposed to be given beforehand, independent of the existence
of concept-mongering creatures, then we have to bite the bullet of idealism:
we need a concept of the world or the real which is capable of accounting for
the replication of reality within itself.21
Our theories of the world as such are part of the world. Our system(s)
of belief are not transcendent entities occupying a deontological space
thoroughly distinguished from the ontological space best described in the
language of physics. We fi rmly believe that the ‘defl ated’ image of Hegel
MYTHOLOGY, MADNESS, AND LAUGHTER
14
does not suffi ce. The fetishism of quantifi cation and of the logical form prevailing
in much of contemporary philosophical discourse is characterized by a lack of
refl ection on its constitution. It is our aim to dismantle this lack and to argue
that we are in need of a twenty-fi rst-century Post-Kantian Idealism
which would, of course, not be geographically restricted. The era of
German Idealism is over, but the era of Post-Kantian Idealism has just
begun (with neo-Hegelianism as its fi rst necessary error).
philosophy from his great idealist successors (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel),
the basic coordinates which render Post-Kantian Idealism possible are
already clearly discernible in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The original
motivation for doing philosophy is a metaphysical one, to provide an
explanation of the totality of noumenal reality; as such, this motivation
is illusory, it prescribes an impossible task.1 This is why Kant’s explicit
motivation is a critique of all possible metaphysics (which is not yet
science). Kant’s endeavor thus necessarily comes after the fact of metaphysics:
in order for there to be a critique of metaphysics, there fi rst has
to be an original metaphysics; in order to denounce the metaphysical
‘transcendental illusion,’ this illusion fi rst has to occur. In this precise
sense, Kant was ‘the inventor of the philosophical history of philosophy’
2: there are necessary stages in the development of philosophy, i.e.,
one cannot directly get at truth, one cannot begin with it, philosophy necessarily
began with metaphysical illusions.3 Post-Kantian Idealists share
Kant’s preoccupation with transcendental illusion but argue that illusion
(appearance) is constitutive of the truth (being). This is what this whole
book is about.4
According to Post-Kantian Idealists, the path from illusion to its critical
denunciation is the very movement of philosophy, which means that the
MYTHOLOGY, MADNESS, AND LAUGHTER
2
successful (‘true’) philosophy is no longer defi ned by its truth-apt
discursive explanation (or representation) of the totality of being, but by
successfully accounting for illusions, i.e., by explaining not only why
illusions are illusions, but also why they are structurally necessary,
unavoidable, why they are not just accidents. The occurrence of illusions
is necessary for the eventual emergence of truth, an idea Fichte, Schelling,
and Hegel inherited from Kant.5 The ‘system’ of philosophy thus no
longer represents the alleged ontological structure of reality, but becomes
a complete system of all metaphysical statements. The proof of the
illusory nature of metaphysical propositions in the traditional sense
consists in an argument to the effect that they necessarily engender
antinomies (contradictory conclusions). Since metaphysics attempts to
avoid the very antimonies which emerge when we make our metaphysical
commitments downright explicit, the ‘system’ of critical philosophy
is the complete – and therefore self-contradictory, ‘antinomic’ – series of
metaphysical notions and propositions: ‘Only the one who can look
through the illusion of metaphysics can develop the most coherent, consistent
system of metaphysics, because the consistent system of metaphysics
is also contradictory’6 – that is to say, precisely, inconsistent.7
The critical ‘system’ amounts to a presentation (Darstellung) of the
systematic a priori structure of all possible/thinkable ‘errors’ in their
immanent necessity, thus preparing the ground for Hegel’s ‘presentation
of appearing knowledge (Darstellung des erscheinenden Wissens)’8: what we
get at the end is not the Truth that overcomes/sublates the preceding
illusions – the only truth is the inconsistent edifi ce of the logical interconnection
of all possible illusions . . . This shift from the representation
of metaphysical Truth to the truth of the shift from error to error is
exactly what Hegel presented in his Phenomenology (and, at a different
level, in his Logic). The only (but crucial) difference is that, for Kant, this
‘dialogic’ process of truth emerging as the critical denouncing of the
preceding illusion is restricted to the sphere of our knowledge, i.e. to
epistemology, and does not concern the noumenal reality which remains
external and indifferent to it, while, for Hegel, the proper locus of this
process is the Thing itself. Like Hegel, the later Fichte and Schelling
ultimately locate the necessary displacement of truth, the necessity of
error, in the noumenal itself.9 In other words, the relative occurs within
the absolute. The absolute is not distinguished from its contingent manifestations.
It loses the status of a substance underlying the illusory
INTRODUCTION
3
appearances and becomes the movement of a self-othering without
which the illusion of a substance could not take place. The traditional
hierarchy of substance and accident is thus completely inverted. The
accidents take over and dissolve substance into a misleading appearance.
In our view, the reason for this ontological overcoming of epistemological
dichotomies (appearances vs. the thing in itself; necessity vs.
freedom etc.) can indeed be motivated by the Post-Kantian insight that
the very mode of appearance occurs within the noumenal. If we oppose
the noumenal and the phenomenal in terms of an account of the
fi nitude of knowledge we blind ourselves to the fact that this opposition
ex hypothesi occurs within the noumenal itself. Otherwise put, the whole
domain of the representation of the world (call it mind, spirit, language,
consciousness, or whatever medium you prefer) needs to be understood
as an event within and of the world itself. Thought is not at all opposed to
being, it is rather being’s replication within itself.
In what, then, does the break between Kant and Post-Kantians
consist? Kant sets out with our cognitive capacities. The apparatus of our
cognitive capacities is affected by (noumenal) things and, through its
active synthesis, organizes affections into phenomenal reality. However,
once Kant arrives at the ontological result of his critique of knowledge
(the distinction between phenomenal reality and the noumenal world of
Things-in-themselves), ‘there can be no return to the self. There is no
plausible interpretation of the self as a member of one of the two worlds.’10
This is where practical reason enters the picture: the only way to return
from ontology back to the domain of the Self is freedom. Freedom unites
the two worlds, and it provides the ultimate maxim of the Self: ‘subordinate
everything to freedom.’11
Yet, at this point a gap between Kant and his followers is opened up.
For Kant, freedom is an ‘irrational,’ i.e. unexplainable ‘fact of reason,’ it
is simply and inexplicably given, something like the umbilical cord inexplicably
rooting our experience in the unknown noumenal reality. While
Kant would refuse to regard freedom as the fi rst theoretical principle out
of which one can develop a systematic notion of reality, Post-Kantian
Idealists from Fichte onwards transgress the limit constitutive of noumenal
freedom in Kant’s sense and endeavor to provide the systematic
account of freedom itself. Freedom’s self-explication assumes a different
shape. Freedom is no longer opposed to necessity, it does not remain a
transcendent postulate, but becomes an inherent feature of being as
MYTHOLOGY, MADNESS, AND LAUGHTER
4
such. For precisely this reason, Schelling in his Essay on Human Freedom
recommends a ‘higher realism’ of freedom:
It will always remain odd, however, that Kant, after having first distinguished
things-in-themselves from appearances only negatively
through their independence from time and later treating independence
from time and freedom as correlate concepts in the metaphysical
discussions of his Critique of Practical Reason, did not go further toward
the thought of transferring this only possible positive concept of the
in-itself also to things; thereby he would immediately have raised
himself to a higher standpoint of reflection and above the negativity
that is the character of his theoretical philosophy.12
The status of the limits of knowledge changes with German Idealism.
The epistemological fi nitude of reason which cannot legitimately be
transgressed without generating metaphysical nonsense for the Idealists
indicates the limitations of Kantian refl ection. They believe that Kant got
stuck half-way, whereas from a thoroughly Kantian perspective, his
idealist successors completely misunderstood his critical project and fell
back into pre-critical metaphysics or, worst even, mystical Schwärmerei.
Accordingly, there are mainly two versions of the passage from Kant to
German Idealism which respectively result from the unfortunate and
often even hostile dividing line within contemporary philosophy. Philosophers
who characterize themselves by belonging to the analytic tradition
(a term which, as a matter of fact, denotes at the most a family
resemblance of methods) tend to believe that Kant is the last traditional
philosopher who, at least partially, ‘makes sense.’ Until most recently,
analytic philosophers defi ned themselves by a deep hostility towards the
Post-Kantian turn of German philosophy and (in the wake of Moore and
Russell) regarded it as one of the greatest catastrophes, as a bunch of
undisciplined regressions into meaningless speculation and so forth. On
the other hand, there is a group of philosophers who deem the Post-
Kantian speculative-historical approach to philosophical thought the
highest achievement of philosophy which we have not yet even fully
understood. They believe that many of the central insights of German
Idealism still wait to be translated into contemporary philosophy.
However, the latter group of philosophers tends to neglect those features
of German Idealism which, at fi rst glance, do not appear to be translatable
into contemporary philosophy. Yet, we fi rmly believe that it is an
INTRODUCTION
5
important task of contemporary philosophy to create new possibilities of
expression out of an original approach to the problem of subjectivity in
German Idealism.
There are roughly speaking two perspectives on the turn from Kant
to Post-Kantian Idealism. (1) According to the fi rst approach, Kant
correctly claims that the gap of fi nitude only allows for a negative access
to the noumenal, while Hegel’s absolute idealism, to name one example,
dogmatically closes the Kantian gap and returns to pre-critical metaphysics.
(2) According to the second approach, Kant’s destruction of metaphysics
does not even go far enough, because it still maintains the
reference to the Thing-in-itself as an external, albeit inaccessible entity.
Seen from this vantage point, Hegel merely radicalizes Kant, by offering
a transition from a negative access to the Absolute to the Absolute itself
as negativity.
In this volume, we will defend a reading along the lines of (2). However,
we will not just offer another perspective of the transition from Kant to
Hegel. We will rather focus on some widely neglected features of Post-
Kantian Idealism which speak in favor of our overall thesis: German
Idealism was designed to effectuate a shift from epistemology to a new ontology
without simply regressing to pre-critical metaphysics. It locates the gap between
the alleged absolute (the thing in itself) and the relative (the phenomenal world)
within the absolute itself. It is a crucial duty of contemporary Post-Kantian
Idealism to make sense of this shift in order to contribute to the overcoming of
epistemology as prima philosophia.
If totality exists, then it necessarily remains incomplete if we continue
to exclude error from truth. Error, illusion, misunderstanding, negativity,
fi nitude, etc. are necessary preconditions for an adequate, nonobjectifi
ed understanding of the absolute as the opening up of a domain
within which determinate (fi nite) objects can appear.
As Slavoj Žižek argues, Hegel’s decisive move draws on the dialectical
insight that our incomplete knowledge of the thing turns into a positive
feature of the thing which (qua fi nite, determinate object) is in itself
incomplete and inconsistent. This is the Hegelian shift from the epistemological
obstacle to the positive ontological condition of appearance.
In other words, Hegel does not ‘re-ontologize’ the Kantian framework.
On the contrary, Kant’s philosophy needs to be properly ‘de- ontologized,’
insofar as it conceives the gap of fi nitude as merely epistemological,
insofar as he continues to presuppose (or postulate) the vision of a fully
MYTHOLOGY, MADNESS, AND LAUGHTER
6
constituted noumenal realm existing out there. The Post-Kantian destruction
of this potentially damaging remainder of ontology consists in transposing
the gap into the very texture of reality. In other words, Fichte’s,
Schelling’s, and Hegel’s move is not to ‘overcome’ the Kantian division,
but, rather, to assert it ‘as such,’ to drop the need for the additional
‘reconciliation’ of the opposites. Through a purely formal, parallactic
shift, Post-Kantian Idealism gains the insight that the refl ective positing
of the distinction constitutive of fi nitude already is the reconciliation.13
Kant’s failure lies thus not so much in his remaining within the confi nes
of fi nite oppositions, in his inability to reach the infi nite, but, on the
contrary, in his very longing for a transcendent domain beyond or behind
the realm of fi nite oppositions: Kant is not unable to reach the infi nite,
because there is no such ‘thing’ as the infi nite waiting to be discovered.
This is why Kantian refl ection always already inhabits the allegedly
transcendent realm of freedom. Our freedom consists in the ability to
draw the distinction constitutive of fi nitude.
To acquire a more precise insight into the uniqueness of Post-Kantian
Idealism, it is also possible to access it from the other end of history, that
is from the vantage point of Post-Hegelian anti-philosophy and its
criticism of the idea of a ‘mirror of nature’ (Rorty), i.e. of representationalism
as such. Post-Hegelian anti-representationalism in its various
disguises (deconstruction, post-structuralism, neo-pragmatism, and so
forth) seems to debunk the language of representation/appearance
altogether. Instead, it emphasizes the excess of the pre-conceptual productivity
of Being or nature over its representation: representation is
reduced to truth-apt discourse which is rooted in the productive ground
of what there really is. Whereas Hegelianism still seems to operate on a
transcendental level, apparently ascribing the power of world production
to an absolute subjectivity, Post-Hegelian anti-philosophy is characterized
by the introduction of a determination of self-determination that
cannot be dissolved into the movement of a self-othering of absolute
subjectivity. As Walter Schulz has argued in his infl uential book The
Completion of German Idealism in Schelling’s Late Philosophy, Post-Hegelian
anti-philosophy which already begins with the later Fichte and Schelling
defi nes itself as ‘mediated self-mediation (vermittelte Selbstvermittlung).’14
The subject is thrown into a process of self-mediation it ultimately
neither controls nor triggers. The subject, in other words, turns out to be
the result of an inversion which alienates the subject from its alleged
INTRODUCTION
7
capacity to transparently manage itself. The later Schelling refers to this
process in terms of an ‘ecstasy’ of the subject or, even more fundamentally,
as an ‘uni-versio,’ an inversion of the One.
If we regard the process that we postulate here or rather whose
possibility we indicated in general, this process appears to be a process
of inversion, that is to say, of an inversion of the One, of the preactual
Being, of the prototype of all existence, for that which is the
subject, –A, becomes the object, and that which is the object (+A),
becomes the subject. Hence, this process can be called ‘universio’
whose immediate result is the inverted One – Unum versum, whence
universe.15
To be sure, according to our view of Post-Kantian Idealism, Hegelian
dialectics too draws on inversion as the true motor of the dialectical
movement; recall the ‘inverted world’ of philosophy Hegel refers to in
the Phenomenology.16 Hegelian dialectics is precisely a movement of autodisplacement
which is not enacted by a pre-established absolute subjectivity
or, even more absurd, by some transcendent absolute subject.
The general thrust of our argument is that the alleged ‘Post-Hegelian’
turn of philosophy really takes place in the work of Fichte, Schelling, and
Hegel and it does so in a more refl ected manner than much of the selfdeclared
overcoming of Hegel in twentieth- century analytic and continental
philosophy.
In so-called post-structuralism, for example, the relation between the
two terms of a binary opposition (phenomenal/noumenal, subject/
object, etc.) is inverted: the presence (the space) divided and thereby
required by the opposition is denounced as the illusory result of a productive
process which can never be presented. The self-othering of
binary oppositions exhibited by the performance of deconstruction
generates an absence which is, however, not the absence of something
which antecedes the inversion of the opposition. In other words, poststructuralism
could object against our reading of German Idealism that it
still privileges one relatum of a binary opposition over the other in order
to defi ne an absolute immune to inversion. It could make the case that
we leave the original One untouched to the effect that it remains the
subject of a merely accidental uni-versio. Post-structuralism invokes an
account of the shift taking place in the inversion which might appear to
dispose of the absolute in an even more radical way than suggested by
MYTHOLOGY, MADNESS, AND LAUGHTER
8
Post-Kantian Idealism’s interpretation of the notion of the absolute in
terms of a self-othering activity.
However, we will argue against precisely this objection. The absolute
of the German Idealists is not some pre-existing totality or some absolute
subject creating the course of worldly events out of its unhampered
spontaneity. Such an interpretation of German Idealism would miss the
crucial shift from substance to subject. The subject Hegel has in mind is
an absolute negativity which can only constitute itself after the fact.
Without its manifestation, i.e. without the fi nite, it would be nothing.
The ‘absolute’ is, hence, nothing but the proper name of the belatedness
constitutive of any logical space as such: our conceptual abilities to refer
to something determinate in the world can only take place after the fact.
The fact is constituted by this ‘after,’ by the belatedness of the subject.
Let’s say that ‘ontological excess’ denotes the excess of productive
presence over its representation, the X which eludes the totalizationthrough-
representation. Once we accomplish the step towards the gap
within the space of productive presence itself, the excess becomes the
excess of representation which always already supplements productive
presence. A simple political reference can make this point clear: the
Master (a King, a Leader) at the center of a social body, the One who
totalizes it, is simultaneously the excess imposed on it from outside. The
struggle of the center of power against the marginal excesses threatening
its stability cannot ever obfuscate the fact, visible once we accomplish a
parallactic shift of our view, that the original excess is that of the central
One itself. As Reiner Schürmann would put it, all hegemonies as such
are broken.17 In Lacanian terms we can also say that the One is always
already ex-timate with regard to what it unifi es. The One totalizes the
fi eld it unifi es by way of ‘condensing’ in itself the very excess that threatens
this fi eld.
In other words, any totalizing gesture of completion derives its energy
from something which cannot be constituted by the very gesture itself.
The very intention of completion, of a fully determinate, all-encompassing
structure fails because the activity of constituting cannot itself be
constituted in the terms of the overall sphere of intelligibility which is
the result of the activity.
To illustrate this point, let us consider Italo Calvino’s ‘A King Listens.’18
In an anonymous kingdom, the royal palace becomes a giant ear and the
INTRODUCTION
9
king, obsessed and paralyzed by fears of rebellion, tries to hear every
sound that reverberates in his palace: footsteps of the servants, whispers
and conversations, fanfare trumpets at the raising of the fl ag, ceremonies,
sounds of the city at the outskirts of the palace, riots, the rumble of
rifl es, etc. He cannot see their source but is obsessed by interpreting their
meaning and the destiny they are predicting. This state of interpretive
paranoia only seems to halt when he hears something that completely
enchants him: through the window the wind brings a singing voice of a
woman, a voice of pure beauty, unique and irreplaceable. For the king it
is the sound of freedom: he steps out of the palace into the open space
and mingles there with the crowd . . . The fi rst thing to bear in mind
here is that this king is not the traditional monarch, but a modern totalitarian
tyrant: the traditional king doesn’t care about his environment, he
arrogantly ignores it and leaves the worry and care to prevent plot to his
ministers; it is the modern leader who is obsessed by plots. This is why
the perfect formula of Stalinism, of the system of endless paranoiac
hermeneutics is ‘to rule is to interpret.’ So when the king is seduced by
the singing voice of the woman pronouncing immediate life-pleasure,
this is obviously (although, unfortunately, not for Calvino himself) a
fantasy – precisely the fantasy of breaking out of the closed circle of representations
and of rejoining the pure outside of the innocent presence
of the feminine voice. However, the fantasy of the pure outside, the
fantasy of the original One anteceding its inversion or even perversion
by the symbolic order, is nothing but the excess of the self-mirroring
prison-house of representations. What this fantasy misses is the way this
innocent externality of the voice is itself already refl exively marked by
the mirror of interpretive representations. This is why one can imagine
what the story’s ending really is, what is missing in Calvino’s explicit
narrative: when the king exits the palace, following the voice, he is
immediately arrested: for the feminine voice was an instrument of the
plotters to lure him out of the safety of the guarded palace.
If one translates the moral of this story into the language of philosophy,
it becomes evident that the One, the master-signifi er which is
supposed to constitute the ‘divine gift’ of intelligibility, is not exempt
from the process of totalization. The obvious problem is that there are
various simulacra of the One, various totalizing opportunities which are
inherently destabilized because they are only maintained by the fantasy
MYTHOLOGY, MADNESS, AND LAUGHTER
10
of an original One. In other words, the Hegelian ‘true infi nite’ is the
infi nity generated by the self-relating of a totality, by the short-circuit
which makes a totality an element of itself (or, rather, which makes a
genus its own species), which makes re-presentation part of presence
itself. The One is included in the act of excluding it. It becomes the inclusion
of exclusion, i.e. the inversion of itself. This inversion occurs within
totality: fi rst, a paradoxical element (which is not a proper element of
the apparently all-encompassing set-structure in question) is designated
as transcendent and secondly this paradoxical element is drawn into
totality in an act of closure. The impossibility of reconciling transcendence
and closure motivates Hegel’s claim that totality is not complete, that it
constantly stands in need of its realization in fi nitude. The infi nite is not
always already established but turns out to be the result of an excess of
intelligibility.19
This structure can also be made apropos the properly dialectical notion
of abstraction: what makes Hegel’s ‘concrete universality’ infi nite is that
it includes ‘abstractions’ into concrete reality itself, as their immanent constituents.
For Hegel, the elementary move of philosophy with regard to
abstraction consists in abandoning the common-sense empiricist notion
of abstraction as a step away from the wealth of concrete empirical
reality with its irreducible multiplicity of features: life is green, concepts
are grey, they dissect and mortify concrete reality. (This commonsense
notion even has its pseudo-dialectical version, according to which
such ‘abstraction’ is a feature of mere Understanding, while ‘dialectics’
recuperates the wealth of reality.) Philosophical thought proper begins
when we become aware of how such a process of ‘abstraction’ is inherent in
reality itself: the tension between empirical reality and its ‘abstract’
notional determinations is immanent to reality, it is a feature of things
themselves. Therein resides the anti-nominalist accent of dialectical
thinking (just like the basic insight of Marx’s ‘critique of political economy’
is that the abstraction of the value of a commodity is its ‘objective’
constituent).
This brings us to the question: what is a dialectical self-deployment of
a notion? Imagine, as a starting point, our being caught in a complex and
confused empirical situation which we try to understand, to bring some
order into it. Since we never start from the zero-point of pure prenotional
experience, we begin with the double movement of directly
INTRODUCTION
11
applying the abstract-universal notions at our disposal to the situation.
We analyze it and compare its elements with our previous experience,
generalizing, formulating empirical universals. Sooner or later, we
become aware of inconsistencies in the notional schemes we employ to
understand the situation: something which should have been a subordinate
species seems to encompass and dominate the entire fi eld, different
classifi cations and categorizations clash, without us being able to decide
which one is ‘true,’ etc.
In what, then, resides Hegel’s uniqueness? Hegel’s thought stands
for the moment of passage between philosophy as Master discourse
(the philosophy of the One that totalizes the multiplicity) and antiphilosophy
(which asserts the Real that escapes the grasp of the One).
On the one hand, he clearly breaks with the metaphysical logic of counting-
for-One; on the other hand, he does not allow for any excess external
to the fi eld of notional representations. For Hegel, totalization-in-One
always fails, the One is always already in excess with regard to itself, it is
itself the subversion of what it purports to achieve, and it is this tension
internal to the One, this Two-ness which both makes the One one and
simultaneously dislocates it, it is this tension which is the movens of the
dialectical process. In other words, Hegel effectively denies that there is
a Real external to the network of notional representations (which is why
he is regularly misread as an absolute idealist in the sense of the selfenclosed
circle of the totality of the Notion). However, the Real does not
disappear here in the global self-relating play of symbolic representations:
it returns with a vengeance as the immanent gap or obstacle on
account of which representations cannot ever totalize themselves, on
account of which they are ‘non-All.’20
In our spontaneous mind-frame, we dismiss such inconsistencies as
signs of the defi ciency of our understanding: reality is much too rich and
complex for our abstract categories, we will never be able to deploy a
notional network able to capture its entire wealth . . . However, once we
develop a refi ned theoretical sense, we sooner or later notice something
strange and unexpected: it is not possible to clearly distinguish the inconsistencies
of our notion of an object from the inconsistencies which are
immanent to this object itself. The thing itself is inconsistent, full of
tensions, struggling between its different determinations, and the deployment
of these tensions, this struggle, is what makes it ‘alive.’ Take
MYTHOLOGY, MADNESS, AND LAUGHTER
12
a particular state: when it malfunctions, it is as if its particular (specifi c)
features are in tension with the universal idea of the state. Or take the
Cartesian cogito: the difference between me as a particular person
embedded in a particular life-world and myself as abstract subject is part
of my particular identity, since to act as abstract subject is a feature that
characterizes individuals in modern Western society. The notional reality
is not opposed to the empirical. It is not the case that we simply take in
an in itself consistent world to which we then apply a propositionally
structured system of beliefs. This idea itself is already the application
of a notional structure, one way of describing our position in the world,
what Gabriel in his chapter will call a ‘constitutive mythology’.
The transition from Kant to Hegel can be formulated as the passage
from the notion of a substantial Real to the purely formal Real. The formal
Real is the immanent gap within the coordinates of representation.
Another key fi gure of nineteenth-century philosophy, Schopenhauer,
also contributed to this transition in his interpretation of the noumenal
thing as will. The Kantian unknowable which escapes our cognitive
grasp turns out to be the ontological essence of cognition. Intentionality,
i.e. our reference to determinate objects in the world, is directed by the
will, by the noumenal itself, which objectifi es itself in our referring
to determinate objects. What happens in Hegel is that the Real is thoroughly
de-substantialized: it is not the transcendent X which resists
symbolic representations, but the immanent gap, rupture, inconsistency,
the ‘curvature’ of the space of representations itself.
One of the most prominent anti-Hegelian arguments reminds us of the
fact of the Post-Hegelian break: what even the most fanatical partisan of
Hegel apparently cannot deny is that something changed after Hegel, that
a new era of thought began which can no longer be accounted for in
Hegel’s own explication of absolute conceptual mediation; this rupture
occurs in different guises, from Schelling’s assertion of the abyss of prelogical
will (later vulgarized by Schopenhauer) and Kierkegaard’s
insistence on the uniqueness of faith and subjectivity, through Marx’s
assertion of actual socio-economic life-process, up to Freud’s notion of
‘death-drive’ as a repetition that persists beyond all dialectical mediation.
Something happened after Hegel, there is a division between before and
after, and while one can argue that Hegel already announces this break,
that he is the last of the idealist metaphysicians and the fi rst of the postmetaphysical
historicists, one cannot really be a Hegelian after this break.
INTRODUCTION
13
Hegelianism has lost its innocence forever. To act like a full Hegelian today
is the same as to write tonal music after the Schönberg revolution.
The predominant Hegelian strategy that is emerging as a reaction to
this scare-crow image of Hegel the Absolute Idealist, is the ‘defl ated’
image of Hegel freed of ontological-metaphysical commitments, reduced
to a general theory of discourse and to discourse’s constitutive normativity.
This approach is best exemplifi ed by so-called Pittsburgh Hegelians
(Brandom, McDowell): no wonder Habermas praises Brandom, since
Habermas also avoids directly approaching the ‘big’ ontological question
(‘are humans really a subspecies of animals, is Darwinism true?’), the
question of God or nature, of idealism or materialism. It would be easy
to prove that Habermas’s neo-Kantian avoidance of ontological commitment
is in itself necessarily ambiguous: while Habermasians treat
naturalism as the obscene secret not to be publicly admitted (‘of course
man developed from nature, of course Darwin was right . . .’), this
obscure secret is a lie, it covers up their deeply idealist form of thought
(the a priori transcendentals of communication which cannot be deduced
from natural being). The truth is hidden and at the same time manifested
in the form: while Habermasians secretly think they are really materialists,
the truth lies in the idealist form of their thinking. To put it provocatively,
Habermasians tend to be royalists in the republican form. They
reduce naturalism to a fruitful hypothesis which seems to be inevitable
given that contemporary discourse has committed itself to a scientifi c
world-picture. Yet, to be an actual naturalist is not to subscribe to necessary
fi ction, but to really believe in materialism. It is, in other words, not
enough to insist that Kant and Hegel have to teach us something about
the realm of normativity which takes place in the wider domain of the
realm of nature. It is, on the contrary, important to re-appropriate
German Idealism to a fuller extent. If discourse, representation, mind, or
thought in general cannot consistently be opposed to the substantial real
which is supposed to be given beforehand, independent of the existence
of concept-mongering creatures, then we have to bite the bullet of idealism:
we need a concept of the world or the real which is capable of accounting for
the replication of reality within itself.21
Our theories of the world as such are part of the world. Our system(s)
of belief are not transcendent entities occupying a deontological space
thoroughly distinguished from the ontological space best described in the
language of physics. We fi rmly believe that the ‘defl ated’ image of Hegel
MYTHOLOGY, MADNESS, AND LAUGHTER
14
does not suffi ce. The fetishism of quantifi cation and of the logical form prevailing
in much of contemporary philosophical discourse is characterized by a lack of
refl ection on its constitution. It is our aim to dismantle this lack and to argue
that we are in need of a twenty-fi rst-century Post-Kantian Idealism
which would, of course, not be geographically restricted. The era of
German Idealism is over, but the era of Post-Kantian Idealism has just
begun (with neo-Hegelianism as its fi rst necessary error).