This is a challenge to one of the cen-tral interpretational theses that Cirne-Lima de-fends on Hegel: that we should read “contradic-tion” as “contrariety”. At first, I reconstruct Cirne-Lima’s interpretation and raise two cri-tiques: (I) Cirne-Lima ignores the origin of the concept “contradiction” as applied to statements of conceptual identity; (ii) Cirne-Lima only pays attention to one type of incompatibility involved in the “negation” that constitutes contradiction and forgets Hegel’s thesis on the “bound return to the ground”. In the final parts (...) of my paper, I dis-cuss the consequences of Cirne-Lima’s interpre-tation. The consequence of (i) is the development of an interpretation that doesn’t regard anything beyond what Hegel calls “external reflection” (“isof predication”) and ignores the role of “contra-diction” in “inner reflection” (“is of identity”). That of (ii) is the interpretation of “contradiction” as a mere “play of opposites”. I suggest that this last constraint is analogous to what Brandom calls “material incompatibility” and completely misses one of the main dimensions of Hegel’s “negative”: self-reference. To support my argu-ment (i) I rely on Pippin's remarks on the Logic of Essence and, in the case of (ii), Henrich’s the-sis, which Bordignon followed to criticize Bran-dom, that to be self-referential is a constitutive di-mension of “determinate negation”. (shrink)

I argue that Hegel’s concept of freedom requires the dissolution of dichotomies between history and nature. Ultimately, dissolving them would lead to an embodied concept of agency, whereby the singularity of each concrete organism finds normative expression within a free form of life. For that, I suggest that the dialectical thesis of speculative identity intertwines social critique with the critique of philosophical language. I shall call this procedure a “grammatical critique”, revealing Hegel’s shift to a vital normativity as its therapeutic (...) moment. That will allow me to present the social pathologies of dualistic forms of life as a withholding of the fluidity of organic nature, instantiated in the body-mind split. I then turn to Adorno’s notion of “recording nature”, arguing that it fulfils the dialectical criteria for a free form of life, that is: one in which its agents are able to reflexively enact their vital normativity. (shrink)